Friday, June 29, 2012

The latest ridiculous thing...

Somebody sued Netflix for not providing closed captioning of all streamed movies...

...and won.

First of all, Netflix can only provide closed captioning if the rights holders agree to it. Are they supposed to violate copyright in order to abide by the ADA?

Now, I do think that streamed movies should be captioned. Of course they should. But it is not Netflix's fault if the producer of the movie didn't provide the data needed to do so. It's the producer's fault.

AND this is a horrible precedence. Will somebody now, for example, sue Zynga because their games can't be played by blind people? There's content on the web that simply can't be made friendly to everyone with every disability. If everything has to be, then we'll be right back to the 1980s and early 1990s when everything had to be text only because so many people were still using Lynx...

Do I have sympathy for disabled people? Heck yes. It's a 'there but for the grace of god'. But not all content can be made suitable for everyone. Internet music radio is never going to be much use to somebody who is totally deaf...

Balance in all things.

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