The proximate cause of this removal is Gallaudet University [1] [2].

What possible motivation could have moved those employees to file on behalf of their university? Malicious intent (they didn't want the free material competing with their courses)? Lack of gratitude (the material is free, but that's not enough)? Zealotry (everything, even free content, must meet their ADA compliance standards)? Simple lack of thinking through potential consequences? Lack of Net citizenship/spirit? Anyone have any insight into the real story behind their protest? I don't want to excoriate them without knowing the whole story, it could have been just someone's doh! moment turned into a really bad outcome.

I know there are closed-captioning format standards. Perhaps someone can create a site that runs closed captioning underneath YouTube videos, with the closed captioning supplied by volunteers (kind of like how closed captioning was done by anime fans)? Hook it up to a GitHub backend so closed caption data can be refined by anyone, with appropriate sidebar discussions. Hook it up to Google Translate to generate Braille and foreign translations of the hand-curated closed captioning, and let users refine the auto-generated translations. Then prevail upon the DOJ and Gallaudet University to give this time to develop instead of hammering on UC Berkeley, and let Creative Commons-licensed closed captioning fill in the content everywhere for all access-challenged students, for all content? Google might be interested to use this as a corpus for Deepmind.

Gallaudet University could have pioneered a solution and become the world leader in automated accessible content generation working in partnership with Google Deepmind, for example. That would have brought in way, way more funding through licensing than this short-sighted approach they are taking now. If Gallaudet University established a CS focus upon this, it would draw in top global talent for a variety of specialties. HAL-like accurate automated lip-reading coming out of this, with even more accuracy when using mic arrays? Yes, please; you get something like that even 90% accurate and you just gave a mindgasm to every meeting-organizer in the world who wants meeting notes taken. And as much as you all hate meetings, if you had a near-irrefutable better-than-stenographer CYA from meeting notes just once, I guarantee you would love that mechanism, increased meetings frequency or no.

This is a darkening of the Net and education in general, and it should not stand. Unless the reporting on this development is simply not including their side of the story, that Gallaudet University is not front and center of this issue trying to get ahead of the outcome by seeking win-win solutions should be making them a pariah on the Net and in the education world. Gallaudet University pursuing a perfect-is-enemy-of-good tactic likely has not considered that they just pulled free education for hundreds of millions of young minds in the developing nations who cannot afford anything close to a world-class education, but have family and friends willing to translate for them. That's unnecessary.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-...

[2] http://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/03/09/government-over-regu...

UPDATE: I glanced at the YouTube API, and it seems the IFrame Player API supports returning playback status and elapsed seconds [3], so closed captions running underneath an iframe'd video and dynamically responding to the state of the video appears feasible. Only a 5-minute glance, though, so I might have missed other bits for analyzing for feasibility.

[3] https://developers.google.com/youtube/iframe_api_reference#P...