SoMeLaw Blog on Netflix

The social media law blog SoMeLaw Thoughts has this interesting commentary on the Netflix decision, about which I've blogged a couple of times.  An excerpt:

Given the uncertain nature of the law and the regulations so far, what does this tell us about whether corporations and individuals should spend the time including captions on online videos? My take is that it’s a good idea to do so now. Partly because it’s the right thing to do, and partly because most courts are going to be sympathetic to entities who have made at least a good-faith effort to provide captioning. 

Captioning is time-consuming, and can be expensive (and real-time captioning for webinars and suchlike is even more expensive). But it’s not difficult anymore. YouTube’s voice-recognition capability makes the process more like editing and less like transcribing. Not to mention that captioning adds value in terms of SEO (which is why YouTube does it). And captioning makes your video more inclusive, and I think we can all agree that that is a good thing. And I also think we can all agree that it’s just wrong to make cats dress up in Renaissance fair costumes and lip-sync to Katy Perry songs.