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Re: Linking to YouTube videos from course Web sites

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From: John E. Brandt
Date: Apr 4, 2008 10:20AM

My initial response to this question is: If you are using video in teaching
a course in which there is primary content communicated in audio (primarily
spoken content), it needs to be captioned regardless of who owns the
content.

Videos posted on YouTube may be copyrighted, but the Terms of Use notes that
by posting the content there is an intention that it will be "shared." You
can read the legal stuff here: http://www.youtube.com/t/terms - As such,
"mashups" of YouTube content are rather common. The issue of adding
transcripts is not addressed (as far as I could see). The major violation of
the Terms would be to use someone else's content for commercial purposes
(e.g., selling it). So, my interpretation is that a transcript of the
content would be permissible. It certainly wouldn't hurt to contact the
"author" of the content and seek permission to use, transcribe and/or
caption the content for educational purposes.

That said, how you operate in your institution will depend to some extent on
your institution's policy. If you are an institution in the USA and
following strict Section 508 and or WCAG guidelines, I believe all of the
video/audio content used for instruction needs to be captioned or
transcribed. There are likely to be institutional copyright policies and
those related to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") that will
also need to be followed.

If you are in the USA, the rules are still somewhat vague regarding whether
colleges or community colleges must comply with Section 508. But, my
understanding of the recent situation in the University of California system
(see http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_message.php?id=11164 and
http://www.calstate.edu/accessibility/ ) has resulted in a precedent being
set that other colleges must comply with to - paraphrasing here - provide
the same access to materials to all students. As this was an Office of Civil
Rights (OCR) ruling, I think it applies to all similar institutions.

On a practical note...being that you cannot predict who your students will
be, you cannot presume you will not need course content in an alternate
format. If a student with a disability arrives in your class as a transfer
student, two days after the semester starts, and you do not have content
that the student can access, you might be considered in violation of this
obligation to provide the same access to all students. And it might be
difficult to run out and start captioning video at that point.

I am not a lawyer and am not offering legal advice. But I always ask my
audiences when I do presentations on accessibility, do you want to be the
"test case" when the lawyers or OCR comes to town?

~j

John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com