Who doesn’t like a story with a happy ending? In The Weekly Standard last week, in “Berkeley Goes Offline,” Andrew Ferguson told the sad tale of disability-rights activists who had filed a complaint against the University of California, Berkeley, claiming that the thousands of hours of classroom lectures the university posted online (available to the general public, free) violated the Americans with Disabilities Act. Apparently the material hadn’t been formatted to make all of it accessible for the deaf and the visually impaired. The Obama Justice Department agreed. It had threatened to sue UC Berkeley unless elaborate and expensive changes were made to the web videos. The school determined it couldn’t afford to make them. Rather than face a lawsuit from the feds, administrators decided to pull down all the online courses, beginning on the Ides of March. Et tu, Berkeley?
It seemed a tragedy without winners. That was before we saw this headline on a press release from the online platform LBRY. (It’s pronounced “Library”—don’t get us started.) “20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them.” It turns out that Berkeley originally published the lectures under a Creative Commons license, meaning they can be distributed free if properly credited to the university. After reading “Berkeley Goes Offline,” the fine folks at LBRY seized the opportunity to copy all the material before March 15—more than four terabytes worth. It will soon be available to anyone with access to the Internet. Details can be found at LBRY’s website, lbry.io.
From lose-lose to win-win. So turn that frown upside down! We have so few reasons to do that these days.
