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.
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