Stephen Downes

The University of California, Berkeley, is responding to a U.S. Justice Department order to make it educational content accessible to people with disabilities by removing the content from the internet. According to a letter distributed by the university, the removal also serves to "better protect instructor intellectual property from 'pirates' who have reused content for personal profit without consent." This is an example of what I once called the 'high bar' attack on open content, whereby commercial interests make offering open content too expensive by imposing stringent legal requirements against it.