Not that easy. Script -> timing -> correctly muxing, right? Not super hard (I'm an old school, from the very early '90s anime fan), yeah, but what about cheap?
Then to move it into the context of this lawsuit, a likely outcome is red tape to put anything with a audio track on the net, even if it's just to determine that close captioning it is not required (and let me invoke the slippery slope here), or doing that a certain sufficient quality, will be allowed.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.
If you've got a script then software like CMU Sphinx (open source) can use voice recognition to align the words of the script with the time of the soundtrack. Services like YouTube will even do that for you, if you can provide the bare minimum of a transcript.
If even that sounds too hard, you can let YouTube's automatic subtitling produce an initial transcript - sometimes this can be surprisingly good, depending on audio quality and speaker clarity - and just fix up the mistakes yourself.
I'm not saying it's painless (and like you I come from a fansubbing background) but it's well worth the time, and it's easier now than it has ever been.
If you don't want to do it yourself, services like zencaptions.com will caption your video for just $1 per minute.
We've come a long way - it has never, ever, been this easy and cheap to do this stuff.
(Am a little sad to see that I'm being downvoted for saying that, in all honesty. I'm not endorsing this particular lawsuit, just making a general point overall that access is good.)
Perhaps you're getting down voted because of who's pocket you want this "access" to come out of?
Perhaps because you can't conceive that one inevitable result of this is that whole lot less material with audio is going to be published by US institutions going forward?
Especially if a legal regime has to be set up to vet everything posted in any formal way by a member of these communities? In the case of MIT students, they have better things to do with their time than wade through red tape, which they hate.
And how much valuable material already published will likely be pulled?
My single and only point is that access is good. I'm not talking about costs, because it doesn't NEED to cost ANY money - and even when it does, the below-sweatshop rate card of $1/minute is hardly going to break the bank.
I'm saying that ultimately if you put things online for free, your motivation is probably that you want people to see them. Adding captions substantially increases the number of people who can, and will.
Under NO circumstances should anything be pulled or not published at all purely because it isn't captioned. Captions are good but obviously if they're not there, they're not there.
I don't see why I'm being systematically downvoted for saying that. It's not controversial, surely.
Bluntly, when I make and release content for free I'm generally not very interested in paying for small boost in user numbers. Especially since for most videos, that 7-15% boost is maybe ten views.
It's weird that some sections of HN obsess over AB testing the colours of buttons and are happy to pay for that, but putting captions on a video and it's fuck those deaf people.
And they don't seem to realise that it's not just deaf people that benefit from captions. There are a bunch of situations where I could really do with captions -- coffee shops; planes; late nights; etc etc.
"The cost of producing and hosting the material is very much greater than the small cost of providing captions."
So should Google be added to the lawsuit, since they're the ones hosting the called out badly auto-captioned videos, unless of course they're charging Harvard and MIT for the whole service?
I also strongly challenge your contention that noways initial costs of production are so high. Hosting, I don't know, but isn't it getting steadily cheaper?
For me it's not about fuck those deaf people, or about captions being bad. It's about "I am not a big company and I have finite time and dollars to caption every bit of content I produce".
Not that easy. Script -> timing -> correctly muxing, right? Not super hard (I'm an old school, from the very early '90s anime fan), yeah, but what about cheap?
Then to move it into the context of this lawsuit, a likely outcome is red tape to put anything with a audio track on the net, even if it's just to determine that close captioning it is not required (and let me invoke the slippery slope here), or doing that a certain sufficient quality, will be allowed.
Disclaimer, I'm MIT Class of '83, donate to OCW, and am beyond annoyed.