Florida prisons sued for erasing $11M worth of prisoner music purchases
theverge.com
theverge.com
For example, your itunes collection is specific to you. If you die, it's deleted and is not transfered to your heirs. Similarly, Amazon is removing any books you purchased from your kindles if the seller sold them illegally. Also, if you violate any of their terms of service, they often delete the entire collection as well.
IMO there should be a law requiring digital licenses of any content to be fungible similar to physical copies. You should be allowed to transfer them to another service, even if the service stops existing, or they believe you breached some contract.
This would make licenses even more fungible than bank money is today: right now if a bank goes bankrupt, you might not see any money in your accounts, even though it's your money and you are no investor or anything. It's because every bank is "minting" it's own currency. There are models which are different where you have a central bank handing out digital money to the banks.
EDIT: yeesh, downvotes galore for something I figured only made economical sense ..
Though if I were the company who just lost such a juicy contract I'd tell them to go pound sand when they asked for a database dump.
Of course, if you have a perfectly fungible system, you could have websites where you are being lended a medium for a short time (e.g. one day) for really low amounts of money and of course this would be bad for content creators as it would dramatically lower the sales. However, that can be countered by other means e.g. minimum restriction on lending duration (e.g. one day) and fees that content creators get on ownership transfer and each lending interaction (e.g. 5% for the first 5 years after movie release, afterwards 1%).
Not true. Banks aren't minting their own money, and your money is insured. https://www.fdic.gov/
Totally true (aka fractional reserve banking) and is one of the main reasons (a portion of) your deposits are insured.
Not only does it increase the money supply, but the extra money created belongs to the bank. It's pretty much equivalent to being able to print money (with the caveat that there are limit's on how much hey can "print").
We could have a system where that money was simply given to people, not given to banks who then loan it out to people. And IMO that would have a very positive effect om our economy.
Edit: to illustrate this, try this thought experiment. Borrow $10 from a friend. Lend $5 of that to another friend. Congratulations, you've just increased the money supply by $5. That's the exact same method used by banks, but you'd not claim that you're now $5 richer or that you've effectively printed $5.
Your example does not increase yhe money supply.
The ratio is closer to 11%.
The bank does not hand around five dollar bills. The bank simply changes a number, and in doing so changes the contents of an account, increasing it by five dollars. Five dollars that can now be spent.
I would argue that this five dollars has effectively been printed. It was magiced out of thin air. How is it not five dollars? I can spend it.
I believe your thought experiment should be worded thus:
Have a friend write "ten dollars" on a piece of paper (bank account), and give it to you. Everyone will accept this as ten dollars. Write "five dollars" on another piece of paper (bank account), and give it to another friend. Everyone will accept this as five dollars. All the other pieces of paper (bank accounts) that existed beforehand still exist. You now also have two new pieces of paper, which will be accepted as fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars, magiced out of nowhere. This is how the banks do it; they just write on the bank account how much money is in it.
Me: 50$ Friend 1: 50$ Friend 2: 50$
Total: 150$
I borrow 10$ from Friend 1:
Me: 60$ Friend 1: 40$ Friend 2: 50$
Total: 150$
Friend 2 borrow 5$ from me:
Me: 55$ ( I owe 10$) Friend 1: 40$ Friend 2: 55$
Total: 150$
I didn't increased the money supply.
> It's only created in the sense that the person they've lent it to can spend it while the depositor still has it in their account.
That's the thing, the depositor can still use that money. Friend 1 can't spend 50$ right now, only 40$, while the depositor in a bank, can still spend 50$.
The workings in your example if I am a bank:
Me: $50, customer 1: $50, customer 2: $50. Total $150.
Customer 1 deposits $5 with me and I lend it to customer 2.
Me: $50 (my reserves are unchanged), customer 1: $50 (because for the purposes of money supply, the deposit still counts as their money). Customer 2: $55. Total $155.
The counter intuitive bit is the fact that money supply treats deposits as money.
I disagree. They are not simply lending out money that other people deposited. They created new money, out of nowhere. There is a limit on how much of this they can do, but they are not simply lending out money that other people deposited. The bank of England is pretty clear that this money is magiced up out of nowhere; that it is money that did not exist before.
"Therefore, if you borrow £100 from the bank, and it credits your account with the amount, ‘new money’ has been created. It didn’t exist until it was credited to your account."
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/knowledgebank/how-is-money-c...
If I bought a eBook or any kind of media without an expiration date, I want to be in full control. I will buy first from DRM-free stores like Bandcamp or GOG.
Why make it more miserable on purpose and forbid people to use a own mp3 player? (aside from exploiting money)
And why not allow a smartphone or laptop with internet access in general? (and only make exceptions for cartell leaders etc. to not let them continue their buisness inside)
How can you hope to reintegrate people back to society, if you allmost totally disconnect them from normal people and give them only other disconnected criminals to interact with?
Obviously there can be surveillance for dangerous people.
If he is very good he might get a small black and white television with limited access.
If they go back into the system after release, then they clearly deserve more punishment.
There is zero tolerance or compassion in such a system so these people are ripe for all kinds of abuse. Rape, for example, is just something to laugh about in that context.
Regardless of their actions or how people view them, they’re still human beings with rights the should be protected like anyone else’s.
If we actually want to break the cycle, we need to seriously reduce adverse childhood experiences.
Sure thing. Those cold hearted pushers who make people addicted to the killerdrug marijuhana for example, do not deserve the smallest pitty. Put them all in a dark hole where no sun shines, serves them right.
One big reason is because inmate access to communication with the outside world always results in numerous complaints of harassment, usually from inmates' (ex) significant others.
Internet access makes it too easy for inmates to conduct this remote abuse while hiding evidence that they did so.
Setup a web proxy that only allows outbound port 80 and 443, MITMs all port 443 traffic, only GET and HEAD (no PUT/POST/CONNECT), and only to a select list of pre-approved domains (e.g. wikipedia.org, news/educational/government websites, etc), and which records all traffic. Risk of harassment from such a setup seems pretty low, and the inmates might learn something useful.
If a prisoner is researching their own appeal, or communicating with a lawyer about such, wouldn't these restrictions hamper their access to a fair and competent representation?
Prisions should serve to reform inmates, not slowly antagonize them every day.
I guess that the bigger is the inmate population the easier is to make more money.
> But in 2018, the FDOC switched to a new company called JPay, which didn’t honor the earlier purchases. The agency required inmates to trade in their music players for new multimedia tablets, or to pay $25 and have the players shipped to someone outside prison.
That is a perfect business. You have literally captivated customers.
I think that USA do not see inmates as human beings. That is the only way to explain what happens there. But, they are human and abusing them is as much as a crime as abusing anyone else.
Most people in the US don't. Which, combined with its history of racism, goes a long way towards explaining the school-to-prison pipeline.
US is one of the least racist - up to and including freeing slaves.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15...
How many countries had millions of slaves (15% of the population) to free?
Also interesting that you say "up to and including freeing slaves", which excluded the racially founded prison industrial complex that was created to replac e slavery after the 13th Amendment.
Not saying US is the worst, am saying not to ignore USA's ugly history and present, especially USA claims to be the world leader in freedom and human rights.
[0] Even the North didn't support abolishing slavery until after the Civil war started, at which point the argument was largely 'we just fought and won a war over this, lets at least get something out of it".
also, that link is regarding a survey asking people if they think they are racist, it’s hardly objective
I think the US doesn't see most of its citizens as human beings, let alone its inmates. That is indeed the root of this and many problems.
I think it’s important to frame any discussion of criminal justice reform in the US in the fact that our modern legal system is built on laws and loopholes, beginning with the 13th amendment, that exist solely to criminalize and reenslave huge portions of the population.
I highly recommend the documentary “13th” on Netflix for more info.
There's another explanation:
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I'm not a religious person, but sometimes I truly wish hell exists so that these prison profiteers, who have sold their soul to the devil, at least get what they deserve in the afterlife.
Or did they just sign because . . .
While I agree, I think this is more corporations do not give af about their customers. How many music services have done this? I don't have a count, but I've heard of a few.
(They could also pay to ship a CD containing the music)
The article's point is that they lost $11 million in songs. My point was that it appears they could have retained that music for probably a small fee, with that CD being sent to someone outside of prison, or maybe sent to them after they left prison (the details aren't in the article, unfortunately).
I'm annoyed that the article glossed over this.
It costs inmates $1/minute just to make a domestic phone call.
Even the digital items purchased are almost 2x retail price.
May not seem like much to you, but also mind that prison wages are measured in cents and subject to taxation.