Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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'
I live right here, in the US. And, I agree with AC's post. There is no justifiable reason that the prison system should charge as much as $75 for a short conversation with a prisoner. None. That "service" only helps to justify the statement that the prison systems are run for profit.
The United States cannot justify it's huge prison population. The US cannot justify privatized prisons. The US cannot justify locking people away for decades for crimes in which no person was hurt. ESPECIALLY since murderers often walk free after 5 to 10 years.
Face it - our system is fucked. Money making slave holes sums it up nicely.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br