To justify the discipline, they claimed that they were simply enforcing JPay’s intellectual property rights and terms of service.
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. 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. Valeria Buford has been running an Internet campaign to get her brother Leon Benson’s murder conviction overturned. These are hypotheticals, of course, but this issue is playing out in a real legal battle taking place in Indiana, where prison officials have been aggressively enforcing JPay’s intellectual property rights and terms of service. JPay’s terms of service mandate that all disputes be handled through arbitration in Florida. However, if an inmate wanted to fight JPay over who has rights to use the content, they can’t necessarily take it to a regular court. It's unclear why JPay wants ownership of these communications and what they plan to do with them. ( Serial’s Sarah Koenig famously used Global Tel*Link, a competing but also problematic company, to talk to convicted murderer Adnan Syed.) If a radio journalist used the JPay system to conduct extensive interviews with an inmate, JPay could claim ownership of a large portion of the resulting podcast series.If a child sends a photo of a drawing to their incarcerated parent, JPay could own the drawing.If an inmate writes a poem and sends it to his mom on Mother’s Day via JPay’s email services, JPay could own the poem.JPay's terms of service also forbid users from duplicating anything they receive through the system. In other words, JPay is leveraging its exclusive access to prisoner communications to claim rights over anything they or their friends and family transmit. You … acknowledge that JPay owns all of the content, including any text, data, information, images, or other material, that you transmit through the Service. When an inmate or their family member on the outside uses JPay, they agree to a lengthy Terms of Service contract that contains this buried clause: These services aren’t cheap, of course, but many users won’t realize they are handing over more than money. The company also offers a telecommunications system that allows inmates to send and receive emails (including “videograms”) from their tablets or from kiosks within corrections facilities. Prison System,” offering an array of digital services to inmates, including video visitation, money transfers, and multimedia tablets that inmates can use to listen to music or read books. With JPay, though, there’s an extra charge that won’t show up on any credit card statement: the user’s rights to their letters, pictures, videos, and other forms of creative expression.Īs Bloomberg reported, JPay aims to be the “ Apple of the U.S. These companies promise safer and more efficient alternatives to traditional snail mail and in-person visits, but they come at a high price for prisoners and their families, who may be unaware of the extent of the fees and surcharges until they get the bill.
The corrections industry is undergoing a technological renaissance when it comes to inmate communication, with prison contractors offering increasingly sophisticated digital services, such as email and video visitation. JPay, a company that provides digital communications systems to corrections facilities in at least 19 states, is charging inmates and their families an unusual fee to stay in touch: the intellectual property rights to everything sent through its network.
Jpay visits update#
Update May 8, 2015: JPay has changed its terms of service and will no longer claim intellectual property rights over correspondence.
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