Florida Dept. Of Corrections Sued For Screwing Inmates Out Of $11.3 Million In Digital Purchases

from the you-don't-own-what-you-overpaid-for dept

Last fall, the Florida Department of Corrections decided it needed to enrich itself at the literal expense of its inmates. It signed a new contract with new provider of jailhouse entertainment, instantly making $11.3 million in purchased digital goods worthless. You don't own what you paid for, even at inflated prison prices.

The new contract with JPay rendered the purchased content unusable. Even the players purchased by inmates aren't technically theirs and must be returned to the vendor. Not that keeping the players would help much. The licensing agreements covering the content are only valid if the previous contractor is providing the service. Since it's not, the mp3s and ebooks can't be transferred to JPay devices.

Unsurprisingly, inmates are furious. So are their families -- the ones who paid extortionate rates to give their imprisoned family members a little music to enjoy. The DOC recognized this was a problem and created a portal for the filing of complaints related to this disappearance of purchased digital goods. That portal is going to be very useful in the upcoming lawsuit against the Florida DOC for screwing inmates out of their purchases. (h/t Boing Boing)

The Florida Department of Corrections is facing a potential class action over recently forcing inmates to forfeit millions of dollars worth of mp3 and other multimedia files purchased under a since-axed media player contract.

William Demler, a 74-year-old incarcerated man at South Florida Reception Center is the lead plaintiff in the case, which was filed in the northern U.S. District Court on Tuesday with the backing of the nonprofit legal firm, the Florida Justice Institute.

The lawsuit [PDF] says the Florida DOC violated its own contracting guidelines when it decided to prioritize its profits over the inmates' purchases.

As part of this bidding process, both the FDOC’s Invitation to Negotiate Contractual Services, as well as the FDOC’s Request for Proposal for Contractual Services, explicitly stated that compatibility with the FDOC’s prior vendor was a mandatory requirement of the contract, in order to ensure that prisoners would not bear the cost of the transition between vendors:

[T]he proposed system must allow for inmates who currently have a device and/or songs purchased from the current Contractor to transfer and/or obtain updated equipment and/or music compatible with the successful contractor’s Digital Music Player Program. It is the intent of the Department that the implementation of a new Digital Player Program to have little or no financial impact on inmates presently participating in the Department’s current program.

Obviously, that's not what happened. A new contractor was picked based on prison profit margin, disregarding the standards the DOC set for itself. On top of that, the previous contractor offered up its own false assurances about the longevity of purchased digital content.

In addition to touting the qualities of the digital media players themselves, at least one widely-distributed advertisement, which appeared on the digital media player order form itself, also touted various qualities of the Digital Music Player Program, including the following representation:

Browse, search and preselect songs from updated music catalogs holding millions of song titles representing a wide array of music genres. You have the ability to purchase and listen to unlimited music utilizing the re-download feature free of charge. Once music is purchased, you’ll always own it! (emphasis supplied).

The only concession the new vendor has made is one that solves none of the problems created by the new contract. For a fee, inmates can have their mp3s transferred to a new device or CDs, but those copies can only be sent to friends or family members who can hold onto the purchased content until the inmate is released. This means every inmate wishing to access the music and books they thought they owned will have to not only repurchase the content again, but the devices and accessories needed to access them.

The suit is probably a long shot, but it does highlight the bullshit engaged in by companies selling digital media that relies on a thicket of licensing to make its way to the end user. Promising anyone that their digital purchases will be around "forever" is so out of touch with the reality of the situation it should be considered fraudulent on its face. In this case, the planned obsolescence was accelerated by the DOC's desire for a better profit margin. If there's any justice, those profits will go towards replacing the purchased goods it took away from the inmates it houses.

Filed Under: copyright, department of corrections, digital goods, florida, inmates, mp3s, music, ownership
Companies: jpay

Prisons Switch Device Providers; Render $11.3 Million Of Inmate-Purchased Music Worthless

from the fucked-up dept

Yet again, when it comes to digital goods, you don't own what you buy. Inmates in Florida's prison system are learning this fact of life, thanks to a change in jail "entertainment" providers.

In April last year, the Florida Department of Corrections struck a deal with JPay. The private company, spearheading a push to sell profit-driven multimedia tablets to incarcerated people across the country, would be allowed to bring the technology to every facility in the nation’s third-largest prison system.

But there was a catch.

Inmates had already been purchasing electronic entertainment for the last seven years — an MP3 player program run by a different company: Access Corrections. For around $100, Access sold various models of MP3 players that inmates could then use to download songs for $1.70 each. Inmates could keep them in their dorms.

The demand was clear. More than 30,299 players were sold, and 6.7 million songs were downloaded over the life of the Access contract, according to the Department of Corrections. That’s about $11.3 million worth of music.

Because of the tablets, inmates will have to return the players, and they can't transfer the music they already purchased onto their new devices.

The corrections system is switching to JPay. Unfortunately, nothing else is switching. Money isn't easy to obtain in prison, meaning most of this suddenly useless music was purchased with funds from friends and family at inflated prices. The prison system comes out of it OK. It has collected $11.3 million on the sale of worthless infinite goods to a literally captive audience.

Now, with a lucrative JPay contract in effect, inmates are out millions of dollars in digital goods. The only options to keep what they purchased means shelling out more cash for the opportunity to put their purchased music completely out of reach.

The Department of Corrections negotiated an extension with Access Corrections to allow inmates to keep their MP3 players until January 23, 2019 if they choose not to participate in the tablet program.

Manderfield, the department spokesman, said that a department code prohibits inmates from owning more than one MP3 player at a time, but even without that, inmates would be able to keep the players because the contract is ending and there would be no way to service them.

Once returned, the inmates can pay a $25 fee to have their device unlocked or their music downloaded onto a CD before being shipped out to a non-prison address.

All of this stupidity is made possible by greed, greed, and more greed. First, the move to JPay gives Florida prisons even more money: $2.75 every time someone adds money to a JPay account, as well as a cut of any new content sold to inmates for the new devices. This has already resulted in $3.9 million in commissions over a twelve-month period covering April 2017 to March 2018.

The music end involves greed as well. Licensing is a nightmare, thanks to the endless meddling of music labels and performance rights organizations. An MP3 should be able to travel to any other device that supports that format, but it never does (especially not if the devices are controlled by an outside contractor). Licensing fees paid by Access Corrections apparently don't cover transfers of infinite goods to devices produced and sold by someone else. JPay handles its own licensing and even if it covers much of the purchased music, that's just not acceptable to everyone up the line waiting with their hands out.

People who don't have much money or any way to earn much of it are out $11.3 million. The prison gets paid. The service contractors get paid. The labels and PROs get paid. Everyone comes out of this fine except for the people who paid for the goods. If they want to "own" more music, they'll be paying everyone else twice for something they bought.

Filed Under: copyright, flordia department of corrections, florida, mp3s, music, prisons
Companies: access corrections, jpay

Prison Messaging Service No Longer Claims It 'Owns' All Of Your Communications

from the good-for-them dept

We recently wrote about some dangerous terms of service from a big prison messaging service, JPay, in which the company claimed to flat out own any content that anyone sent through its service. While the company itself did not appear to be doing stupid things to enforce this, this clause did allow prison guards to put one prisoner in solitary confinement after his sister posted a video he had sent via JPay to social media. The prison claimed it was doing so to protect JPay's intellectual property.

The company has now told Dave Maass at EFF that it has dropped this clause from its terms of service:

It has recently come to our attention that there is language in our Terms of Service that impacts our customers and their families. The language states that JPay owns all content transmitted through our Email, VideoGram and Video Visitation services. Our intention was never to take ownership and profit in any way from our customers’ content. That is not and has never been JPay’s business and we have removed this language from our Terms of Service. From its inception, JPay has pledged to make our customers our top priority and we will continually strive to meet this pledge as best and as quickly as we can.

Maass is suggesting that they take it a step further and ask prison officials not to punish inmates who use their system, claiming that it's to protect JPay's intellectual property.

Filed Under: copyright, messaging, ownership, prison, terms of service
Companies: jpay

Prison 'Enforces' Messaging Company's 'IP' Rights By Sending Prisoner To Solitary

from the intellectual-property-gone-mad dept

If you aren't aware, the prison communications business is a massive boondoggle for the companies providing those services. Talk about a "captive market." And the companies take advantage of that with absolutely insane rates for things like phone service, some of which became news not too long ago when an expert in this area estimated that the Serial podcast probably had a $2,500 phone bill for its 40 hours of calls with Adnan Syed.

But, of course there are other ways to gouge someone beyond just money. And, as the EFF's Dave Maass has discovered, one major service provider in the space, JPay, forces any user to sign over all rights to any content sent via its system. The company is pretty explicit about this. In the "email" portion of its lengthy terms of service (you have to (1) have javascript enabled and (2) click on the email link to get these to show up), it notes the following: If you can't read that, it says:

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS. You acknowledge that JPay owns all right, title and interest in and to the Service, including without limitation all intellectual property rights (the “JPay Rights“), and such JPay Rights are protected by U.S. and international intellectual property laws. Accordingly, you agree that you will not copy, reproduce, alter, modify, or create derivative works from the Service. The JPay Rights include rights to (i) the Service developed and provided by JPay; and (ii) all software associated with the Service.

You also acknowledge that JPay owns all of the content, including any text, data, information, images, or other material, that you transmit through the Service.

There is a similar clause under the "video visitation" terms of service as well, noting that JPay owns those videos as well.

Now, you can understand JPay claiming IP rights on the service itself. But it's that second paragraph that's insane. Just to use the service, you are saying that JPay owns anything you send via the service. Anything. Maass points out this means that if a child sends a drawing to an incarcerated parent, JPay claims it owns the copyright on that drawing. Or, going back to Serial, all of those recorded calls with Adnan Syed? Well, if it had been done via JPay's system, under those terms, JPay could (theoretically) claim a copyright interest in the recordings, and thus argue that Serial was infringing.

That might be (or might not be) a far-fetched scenario. But there are some very real world scenarios that are coming out as a result of this mess. You may recall a post we did back in February (also based off of excellent work by Maass), highlighting how the South Carolina Department of Corrections was adding new level 1 felony charges to anyone using social media while in prison. This resulted in some prisoners being given multiple years of solitary confinement for merely posting to Facebook.

Maass highlights a case where prison officials similarly punished a convict who recorded a video message via JPay, urging supporters to come to a hearing in his appeal effort. When asked why the guy had lost a bunch of his rights and was put in solitary confinement, the prison said it was merely enforcing JPay's intellectual property rights, even if the company didn't appear to complain about this at all (and, in fact, encouraged people to share the videos created under its system):

Valeria Buford has been running an Internet campaign to get her brother Leon Benson’s murder conviction overturned.  In August 2014, Benson used JPay to record a 30-second videogram thanking his supporters and asking them to attend an upcoming hearing in his appeal. Buford posted this to Facebook, but when prison staff discovered it, Buford’s JPay access was suspended and, according to the Indianapolis Star, Benson was disciplined, sent to solitary confinement, and stripped of good-time days. To justify the discipline, they claimed that they were simply enforcing JPay’s intellectual property rights and terms of service.

[....] According to court records, JPay told Buford directly that she was free to do what she liked with the videogram, including posting it to social media

Oh, and the reason there are court records on this is because Buford is suing, arguing that this whole thing violated her own First Amendment rights:

Buford is currently suing the Indiana Department of Corrections with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana. Although Buford’s JPay access has since been restored, she argues that her First Amendment rights are chilled because she “continues to face loss of her ability to communicate with her brother through [JPay] if she so much as posts an internet message from him.”  

But, as Maass notes, JPay could help out by doing something rather basic here: changing its own terms of service to not claim ownership over all content sent via the system, so that the prison can no longer use that as a bogus excuse to strip prisoners of service just for speaking out.

Filed Under: enforcement, leon benson, messaging, prison, solitary confinement, valeria buford
Companies: jpay