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Prison Messaging System JPay Withdraws Copyright Claims
Florida-based JPay has a specialized business model and an audience that is at least in part a (literally) captive one: the company specializes in logistics and communications services involving prisons and prisoners, ranging from payment services to logistics to electronic communications with prisoners. Now, via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing comes a report from the EFF that the company has back-pedaled on a particularly strange aspect of the terms under which the company provided messaging services for prisoners: namely, JPay's terms of service made exhaustive copyright claims on messages sent by prisoners, claiming rights to "all content, whether it be text, images, or video" send via the service. That language has now been excised, but not in time to prevent at least one bad outcome; from the EFF's description:
[Valerie] Buford has been running a social media campaign to overturn her [brother, Leon Benson's] murder conviction. However, after Buford published a videogram that her brother recorded via JPay to Facebook, prison administrators cut off her access to the JPay system, sent Benson to solitary confinement, and stripped away some of his earned "good time." To justify the discipline, prison officials said they were enforcing JPay's intellectual property rights and terms of service.
What the hell is a "videogram"?!? Back in my day, the only electronic communication we prisoners had with the outside world involved two telephones separated by a thick sheet of wired glass. Damn kids.
They are in there to be "reformed", why do you punish them even more, just because of some stupid ass App.
So the Godfather Tony in Prison doesn't have the copyright on the kill orders he sends from prison?
Oh but what if he is innocent ?
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
You might want to look into how much it costs to execute inmates.
Furthermore, what if they ARE innocent and exonerated later based on new evidence? There've been quite a few cases where someone has spent literally decades in prison only to be proved innocent by a variety of means.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/03/us/alabama-death-row-inmate/
http://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/prosecutors-dismiss-1975-murder-charges-against-3
Would it have been fair or just for these men to have, instead, died?
As long as we can start with you. Before you start your hippie bullshit about "But, I'm innocent, this is different!", just find out how much it would cost to keep your scumbag ass in prison for a year.
Firing squad/noose/guillotine your ass, and we'll be done with you, moron.
Then you punish whoever fucked up the case.
Heck, in California if you commit perjury and get someone executed on bullshit testimony, YOU get the chair next.
Are you late for church?
I agree. Prison shouldn't be "Club Med", it should be a jail cell with no TV, PC, or library.
Some people are innocent. Others may have killed in self defense and were convicted by corrupt prosecutors twisting the facts to the jury because they were more interested in advancing their careers than justice. It could happen to you. These days, it can happen to any of us.
Only when there is absolutely no doubt, the crime is clearly on video, the motive is clearly not self defense, only then should execution be allowed, and I do agree it should be swiftly applied.
And why are you still using my handle? I have been using A.C. for more than 10 years now. Maybe even 15 years. Copycat. Get your own handle.
Do I think the legal system always gets it right... No !! ... No!!
Do I think the balance of ones bank account should be a factor in the determination of justice
Do I think those in power are incorruptible and would never use the legal system against those with less power.... Hell No !!
Do I think that once you kill someone you don't get a second chance to correct you mistake ... Yes
This guy is just a troll. No-one is that stupid....
So you want to make sure that they cannot do anything but stay a criminal after their sentence is finished ?
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
You didn't actually answer the question as to what happens if an innocent man is executed.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
finished?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
People can spend a long time on death row. Punishing those that are guilty of framing an innocent man who faced the death penalty for years might not even possible.
And let's be pretty clear here, most incidents of wrongful imprisonment involve police investigators and prosecutors, both of which are heavily protected against any charges of wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and the like.
So once again, what happens if an innocent man is executed?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Innovative idea : don't execute in the first place. Genius, isn't it?
Oh but what if he is innocent ?
The GP asked you to look at the cost of death row prisoners. I think what he means is paying compensation to relatives for a false conviction is cheaper than keeping them alive until the appeals process is finished, and that he personally feels that this line of logic is acceptible. Personally, I consider this attitude murderous in and of itself. Perhaps the GP will voluntarily submit to the death penalty...?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
You didn't actually answer the question as to what happens if an innocent man is executed.
I think some people view this in a similar way to the military and 'acceptable losses' or 'collateral damage'. They think that since, in military operations, a certain level of combat casualties, innocent civilian casualties or friendly fire incidents are unavoidable and an acceptable 'cost of doing business'.
They fail to recognise the difference between the civil legal system and warfare. And remember, the USA has been at war for most of its existence, its become a way of life and just background noise in the news media.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Before you start your hippy bull shit about "what if he is innocent..." find out, how much it cost to keep one of those scumbags in prison for a year.
Do so yourself; it's far cheaper than executing a prisoner.
I bet most of you wish you could spend that much on yourself for the rest of your life :)
And I bet prisoners feel every last cent's worth of comfort from that money. But you're sort of right; I really, really wish that money went to anything else, anything at all, that's not the prison system.
most incidents of wrongful imprisonment involve police investigators and prosecutors, both of which are heavily protected against any charges of wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution, and the like.
Maybe that's the part that needs to change. Take away some of those protections and then maybe you'll have prosecutors who will place the truth over their own careers.
Do-do-do-do-do-do-do
Day 10318
Now that was a tangent that went through the woods to nowhere interesting
I guess most of you missed " violent repeat criminals"
Sounds harsh but do you really think it's more humane to keep them locked up for 10,20,30 year or for life? Especially for life. What's the point?
One mistake out of hundreds of thousands of violent scum bags? You, ass hole americans, kill more people around the world every day. Calling it collateral damage. And now you worry about murderers an rapists?
The fact is, if person has ended up in jail 2 times because of violence, she or he will be back for third round. There is absolutely no reason to keep that violent scum around.
He didn't even breach the terms of service. His sister did. If anything, she should be sent to solitary for copyright infringement (and don't forget: about 40 years of it, since it's worse than murder).
Why would that make sure they stay a criminal? There are menial unskilled jobs they can do upon release.
That being said, education in prison is likely a good thing to lower the risks of recidivism. The only problem I have with it is the ability to study in careers that they cannot legally or as a matter of practicality, participate in. Certain professional licenses bar felony applicants and industries like banking is not likely to hire a convicted thief. So tailor the opportunities to practical career paths and it should be somewhat productive.
The law given through Moses only has four types of punishment. Incarceration is not one of them. Holding people in custody prior to trial is allowed, but pre-trial custody should not act as punishment either.
By the way, execution for pre-meditated murder is first given to Noah, in the form of a poem, soon after God killed most of the people Noah ever knew. /. can name the other 3...
Let's see if
So let me get this straight. A prisoner sends his sister a video, SHE publishes it, and they send the BROTHER to solitary at the demand of the company. Sounds like the sister needs to be demanding criminal penalties against prison officials as well as her civil suit. Prisoners maybe criminals, but don't punish them for things they did not do. Especially since copyright violation is a civil crime not a criminal one (and claiming copyright over someone else's work by means of a terms of service is questionable at best).
Overturn murder conviction? :)
Murderers belong to a electric chair. Keeping those morons around is total waste of taxpayers money.
Before you start your hippy bull shit about "what if he is innocent..." find out, how much it cost to keep one of those scumbags in prison for a year.
I bet most of you wish you could spend that much on yourself for the rest of your life
Gas/chair/needle all the violent repeat criminals and be done with those morons.
Hmm let's see... assuming the Seattle Times is not just pushing this because they or the report authors are anti-death penalty...
Seeking death penalty adds $1M to prosecution cost, study says
http://www.seattletimes.com/se...
Or according to the Nevada Legislature, "The Legislative Auditor estimated the cost of a murder trial in which the death penalty was sought cost $1.03 to $1.3 million, whereas cases without the death penalty cost $775,000."
(All the study links I can find for that one are either pdf or paywalled)
Kansas: "Defending a death penalty case costs about four times as much as defending a case where the death penalty is not sought, according to a new study by the Kansas Judicial Council. Examining 34 potential death-penalty cases from 2004-2011, the study found that defense costs for death penalty trials averaged $395,762 per case, compared to $98,963 per case when the death penalty was not sought. "
Idaho: "A new, but limited, study of the costs of the death penalty in Idaho found that capital cases are more costly and take much more time to resolve than non-capital cases. One measure of death-penalty costs was reflected in the time spent by attorneys handling appeals. The State Appellate Public Defenders office spent about 44 times more time on a typical death penalty appeal than on a life sentence appeal (almost 8,000 hours per capital defendant compared to about 180 hours per non-death penalty defendant). Capital cases with trials took 20.5 months to reach a conclusion while non-capital cases with trials took 13.5 months."
California: Assessment of Costs by Judge Arthur Alarcon and Prof. Paula Mitchell (2011, updated 2012)
"The authors concluded that the cost of the death penalty in California has totaled over $4 billion since 1978:
$1.94 billion--Pre-Trial and Trial Costs
$925 million--Automatic Appeals and State Habeas Corpus Petitions
$775 million--Federal Habeas Corpus Appeals
$1 billion--Costs of Incarceration
The authors calculated that, if the Governor commuted the sentences of those remaining on death row to life without parole, it would result in an immediate savings of $170 million per year, with a savings of $5 billion over the next 20 years."
Texas: "Each death penalty case in Texas costs taxpayers about $2.3 million. That is about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for 40 years. ("Executions Cost Texas Millions," Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992)." Granted, the Texas study is probably too old for immediate relevance. ...and so on...
Going purely from memory for this next little item, so I cannot provide any citation for it, I seem to recall that the cost of keeping a prisoner on Death Row is about $90,000 to $100,000 higher than keeping a prisoner in the general population.
Sounds to me like the Death Penalty is a ridiculously expensive option, considering that it is primarily there as a deterrent. Given the crime rates in the US, I would have to question whether the deterrent is working. So if it is not working, and it costs a butt-ton of money, why bother with it?
While it's entirely possible that those men are innocent, having the original conviction thrown out and the state declining to prosecute them again after so many years doesn't prove they are innocent. I've always believed that a person who is capable of committing a murder is capable of denying it afterward.
So if you were running Operation Paperclip after WWII, and you got ahold of Werner Von Braun who had recently (within the last 5 years) worked a bunch of concentration camp "inmates" to exhaustion/death building V2 rockets which were used to kill British civilians and destroy British property, you would lock him up with no amenities whatsoever and train him for a manual labor job after release?
Or no, let's fast-forward to the modern era: if you had a child prodigy genius working for NASA who got locked up for chatting with a faux 13-year-old on the Internet, would you lock that guy up today with no TV/PC/anything and train HIM for manual labor upon release?
Stop and think about what you are saying here.
Never has a stronger case of {{citation-needed}} been seen on Slashdot. Show me just one case where a prosecutor or cop was executed.
what most people, including the grandparent post, don't get is that the innocence project is not just a one of set of mistakes based on lack of DNA evidence. 15-50% of US convictions for serious crime are fit up jobs with the cops just choosing the most convenient victim. Those who were sentenced when there was no DNA evidence and still living when it became common are just lucky because the cops who fitted them up could not predict the change in technology.
If you still support the death sentence in America after reading this post then you are a murder yourself.
It's bleeding heart idiots like the above that are the reason prisons don't work. If you make it uncomfortable to be in prison, it'll help teach them a lesson that they shouldn't be breaking the law. But no, give them Club Med and teach them that crime has perks.
Given the crime rates in the US, I would have to question whether the deterrent is working.
I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of convictions in the US wouldn't be eligible for capital punishment in any jurisdiction.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
What's the J in JPay stand for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.glassdoor.com/Revie...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
when has that ever happened? Most gov't employees should feel secure that it would never happen to them.
Because bloodthirsty Christians like the AC that started this thread want to kill kill kill. If you are unlucky enough to be sent to jail, they should just string you up by a rope without the bother of a trial. Please note the overlap of Christianity and the states that want ultra conservative laws and death penalties.
OK, JPay owns all your posts, what does not follow is the Original Poster being liable for any and all copyright violations of the content they created, and what does not follow at all is the prison system acting as an enforcement arm of JPay.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Murderers belong to a electric chair. Keeping those morons around is total waste of taxpayers money.
Before you start your hippy bull shit about "what if he is innocent..." find out, how much it cost to keep one of those scumbags in prison for a year.
It costs us more to reply to your comments than you're worth. Please report to the nearest suicide booth for recycling.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Pausing a person's life and preventing personal development for a few years doesn't help them integrate into society.
Learn to love Alaska
you'd have to kill our Jury trial system. That's why nobody ever brings these cases to trial. The defense & prosecution each get to pick jurors and It's easy to find one "Tough on Crime" juror who will always side with the prosecutor. They indited those cops in Baltimore but it's just for show and to calm things down. After the dust settles they'll drop the charges. Not because they're complacent, but because they know they can't win, even if the police turned out to be guilty.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Kids, can you say, "False dichotomy"?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
He's clearly feeling cranky; perhaps he had planned an illicit rendezvous in a portapotty with a male staffer and when he got to the park, the ingrate was nowhere to be seen... ;)
If not for Chris Rock jokes and my searching through Youtube and then Netflix, I would not have learned what a mess the USs judicial and prison systems are. I also caught up police procedures and criminal behavior by watching "The First 48," on Amazon VOD. Folks, the system is rotten from top to bottom, but also some people just ask for trouble repeatedly. My family was not perfect, but my dad hung around long enough to see me start college. That I recall, our only family incident involving the cops was when my sister ran away upstate. And none of my three siblings and I have drug addictions or preference. Our cousins, on the other had, are total fuck-ups when it came to drugs. One relative sold her house to pay for her now EX-husbands legal fees. In sum, Americans love to get high and are total wackjobs when it comes to functional family dynamics. The population is also too diverse and self-absorbed in "getting theirs" at someone else's expense. I saw some prison specials about the major units in the South and I cringed. There is no way I would ever visit those states and even chance landing in jail. It's like the Twilight Zone or a Charlton Heston movie. I am interested in seeing it change, but Americans are distracted and lethargic. I would rather move to a country with a small, homogenous population, and not on a drug smuggling route. As bad as it sounds, I am looking for one with a low indigenous population as they are often adamant about growing coca. There is no way that the United States will get its shit together in the 25 years left before I retire, and I refuse to keep paying to keep 2 million people in jail.
They are all choosing the "most convenient victim". It is just a lucky coincidence that the guilty are usually more convenient.
Oh but what if he is innocent ?
The GP asked you to look at the cost of death row prisoners. I think what he means is paying compensation to relatives for a false conviction is cheaper than keeping them alive until the appeals process is finished, and that he personally feels that this line of logic is acceptible. Personally, I consider this attitude murderous in and of itself. Perhaps the GP will voluntarily submit to the death penalty...?
With capitol offence level stupidity, the voluntary part shouldn't be necessary.
And I'm sure the OP would be okay with it, since it fits within their world view so well.
Nah, they probably whine up a shit storm over getting a minor traffic ticket.
Some prisoners get sex-offender treatment, and were subject to much more restrictions. They're not likely to even get unskilled jobs, because "children congregate bearby".
City ordinances sometimes are the cause of this, and they'are also known to create sex offender colonies.
I'm well aware that "the establishment" is practically immune.
That's why I was suggesting a *change*.
You know, something OTHER than the status quo?
Keeping fools like *you* around is a total waste of taxpayer money. Nazi Germany had s solution for wasting living space on Polish people, disabled children, gays, prisoners of war, and especially the Jews because they caused the economic blight of Germany and certainly didn't deserve property or money. Much simpler to just kill them all, and better yet make them dig their own graves..
To justify the discipline, prison officials said they were enforcing JPay's intellectual property rights and terms of service.
If you told someone that 20 years ago, they'd have called you a crazed conspiracy theorist and asked where your tinfold hat was. Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Let's make our life's goal the enforcing of "intellectual property" rights and TOS.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
While it's entirely possible that those men are innocent, having the original conviction thrown out and the state declining to prosecute them again after so many years doesn't prove they are innocent.
While it does happen, it's pretty rare for someone to get a Declaration of Actual Innocence - in fact the entire appeals process revolves around procedural and legal errors, not factual ones. Just getting a new trial for someone convicted before DNA testing was available, but who can now prove that their blood or semen doesn't match the evidence, is an uphill battle.
So what would you accept as good enough evidence? The Innocence Project claims to have found 140 actual perpetrators of the crimes that their clients were originally accused of.
Whoops! Someone forgot to take their satire pill today.
Prison in the U.S. is one of the top ten fastest growing industries - as the 13th amendment permits slavery for those imprisoned.
Thirteenth Amendment Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The abuses are intense. With more prisoners per capita than any nation in the world, America is the slave state par excellence thus far in modern history.
excuse me, but /pol/ is over there
read this about the FBI and their decades of convictions due to flaws in hair analysis - "The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions." - just hope that one of your family isn't in that group.
If you still think all people on death row are ALL guilty, you need to get yourself educated on miscarriages of justice.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
When one posts on FaceBook, it is voluntary and one has the choice of donating all "text, images, or video" to Google+, MySpace or (original) BeBo instead. Jpay has a monopoly and surprise, surprise, is treating the user as the product and then abusing users (courtesy of prison staff) anytime the profits of Jpay are threatened. This is the peak of fascism.
Next, prisoners must thank, um, Jpay for raising their chocolate ration to 20 grams per week.
Yes because prisons are so comfortable now, and our recidivism rate is so low. Prison was supposed to be a bout rehabilitation, not just punishment. All prisons do now is turn minor criminals in to major criminals.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Economies of scale. Death Penalty is rare, that is why it is expensive. If you do it every day it becomes very cheap.
If J-Pay is for sending money to prisoners, then what is J-Date?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That's a false equivalent. First, a Nazi war criminal did not violate domestic law. Why would you compare them to domestic criminals. Next, there will be outliers in everything. Surely you don't think every slave driver who ends up killing someone deserves to escape charges and end up with a government job for the rest of their life.
Finally, if there is an overriding government need for some talent the convicted possess, are you fine with giving them a free ride and where does it end. I mean is the sex slave trader who can count to ten entitled to the same treatment as VonBrown?
Most of the time it will allow them to finally grow up. A lot of prison terms are for crimes that essentially are decisions people would never make later in life.