This has entered the legal arena. It's not hard to imagine the red tape of the remedies of a settlement or lawsuit loss being significant, very possibly exceeding the costs of the closed captioning (e.g. mandatory QA). In this context, the idea this quality problem could be addressed by crowd-sourcing is patently ludicrous.
Does anyone have a better solution than Google, which is where the cited bad captions apparently come from? Yeah, it's "a thing" alright, a thing that just handed MIT a nasty, no win lawsuit.
But, in any case leaving aside MIT's 5th largest endowment, it's only one of the factors in determining whether a school is well off. One could also look, say, at the budget. Or research funding.
By just about any metric one could imagine, MIT is one of the richest schools in the nation.
Like helping to allocate a fixed budget and running requisitions through the always skeptical procurement office. So I know MIT didn't switch from cleaning every bathroom every day to "frequent cleaning" because it had a large surplus of funds, and that it's been hurting as the Cold War ended, and now with the Great Recession.
But you're in part moving the goalposts. No one is denying MIT doesn't have a lot of money, we're discussing whether it has such an unrestricted surplus it can all of a sudden properly caption all the video it formally publishes. In a legal regime that'll make that all the more expensive and time and energy consuming. And what will have to be sacrificed to do this, aside from all the videos that will go dark and stay dark.
Especially in the case of the targeted OCW, which most certainly doesn't have the money to do this, and based on its ability to fund raise after it fulfilled its original mandate, would have trouble doing this, and would also certainly have to initially remove all its videos after an adverse outcome. Heck, is MIT going to have to institute policy of cost recovery to cover the expenses of making sure no video gets them into further trouble?
Another thing to consider is that Harvard and MIT were chosen as the initial targets for the obvious reasons. Just how much will the world be enriched when this filters down to every college in the US? Like the one my family shares a property boundary with, which prides itself in providing a low cost education and rents out textbooks. Right now it's very cheap for them to put video on the web. If you're successful, that'll end.