Walter Olson at Overlawyered reports:

Those free online course materials may be gone from the University of California, Berkeley, courtesy of a U.S. Deparment of Justice interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and related statutes, but they’re not gone from the Internet: “20,000 Worldclass University Lectures Made Illegal, So We Irrevocably Mirrored Them” [LBRY] Won’t that infringe on a lot of copyrights? The site claims not: “The vast majority of the lectures are licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows attributed, non-commercial redistribution.” Earlier coverage here, here, here, and here. As someone put it, it looks as if the internet recognizes ADA litigation as damage and routes around it.

Jeremy Kauffman at LBRY gives some more detail:

The LBRY protocol provides a completely decentralized network for discovering, distributing, and publishing all types of content and information, from books to movies. When publishing the lectures to LBRY, the content metadata is written to a public blockchain, making it permanently public and robust to interference. Then, the content data itself is hosted via a peer-to-peer data network that offers economic incentives to ensure the data remains viable. This is superior to centralized or manual hosting, which is vulnerable to technical failure or other forms of attrition.

I wrote about online education and the ADA in Egalitarianism versus Online Education and I’m an adviser to LBRY so I’d like to say that this was my idea but I was not involved!