Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom | Hacker News Reader

Prison Company Patents VR to Give Inmates Brief Taste of Freedom

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88 pointszachguo69 comments

Holy crud, literally everything about this is terrible, from the motivation/phrasing, to the "market" it's a part of, to the followup research about using VR to torture people, to the technical merits of the patent itself.

Rare to find an article that so efficiently touches on so many simultaneous points of awfulness.

I realize it's only one aspect of the article, but it's tough to talk about patent reform when stuff like this that is so obviously not a real invention is still so regularly slipping through the system. There's a real conversation to be had about how much of a patent monopoly we should be granting businesses for legitimate patents, but there's an even bigger conversation to be had about how we ended up with a patent office that's willing to rubber-stamp everything they're handed. Under the current system we have today this patent shouldn't have been granted, it's not a novel invention. That's not even a reform problem it's an... I don't know, caring problem? A lack of review problem?

I think it's worse than the patent office rubber stamping everything. They actually don't rubber stamp things that your average, small inventor might try to patent. They seem to always initially reject applications, requiring multiple submissions with small modifications over and over until they relent and grant.

This serves to filter out everyone except those with deep pockets and highly paid patent attorneys.

When I filed for a patent a few years ago, we got back prior art from the patent office that was very far fetched. We paid $3500 to the attorney for the initial application and then each time it would come back, we would pay a few hundred more.

Our patent attorney estimated that we would end up paying around $10k, but he was fairly certain that we would get through. He said most of his applications followed this same pattern.

We decided to cut our losses at around $5k and move on. A few years later, some large company patented very similar technology. We submitted prior art but they just had to pay for a few more iterations to get around it.

The more examples I hear, the more I think patents should just be thrown out altogether in many cases.

At the very least, software patents in the sense of "if your implementation uses exclusively general purpose computers and software, it cannot be violating a patent".

Alice vs CLS bank threw out most patents saying "do X on a computer." Patents basically have to have a physical effect or give something a property it wouldn't otherwise have, so compression (saving bits) and encryption (giving security properties) are patentable, but most things like web apps and online shopping carts (an infamous patent troll sued many people over this pre-Alice) are not.

> so compression (saving bits) and encryption (giving security properties) are patentable

Which is a huge problem, because now you again need an army of lawyers just to determine whether something is patentable, and can redesign/argue around stuff to make it look patentable even where it should not be.

It would be much nicer if you could say "Here is a mass market consumer grade laptop I purchased at Walmart this morning. Here is the software running on it. Your patent claim is invalid. Your honor, I'd like my legal fees reimbursed and the plaintiff's attorney sentenced to sixty lashes for wasting everybody's time".

Patent examiners are given a relatively limited time/resource budget to examine applications. For that reason they will often reject early as a strategy [ETA: often, in my experience, with very weak "prior art" that basically matches some keywords], then allow more dedicated inventors to revise. This is mainly a filtering strategy, as best I can see. When your attorney quoted you $10K and suggested the patent would eventually be accepted, they were speaking as someone who understood the business and how the process would play out. It's surprising to me that you disregarded their advice and sunk $5K into the process only to walk away. Better to spend nothing than to waste $5K and get nothing from it.

It's ridiculous that you have to spend $10K to patent your idea. Let's just get rid of all those patent office people and lawyers, and save everyone a lot of time and money.

The $10k is a feature, not a bug. Society shouldn't allow patents to be filed without commercial intent (because otherwise you are depriving the world of an idea for 20 years without meaningfully using it), and a $10k pricetag is a good signal of commercial intent. In the EU, patents have escalating fees to make sure that patent rights are only guaranteed as long as a commercial enterprise continues to be successful.

And no, the intent to file and then sell the patent is not a good "commercial intent."

Which means that for rich people / patent trolls what society allows doesn't matter. Patents are definitely a bug, at least in software. Time to get rid of them.

Your surprise comes from a perspective of understanding and trusting the process, presumably from experience. Is it really such a surprise that someone with a different experience -- that of extending trust and having it betrayed -- would find it hard to extend trust a second time?

And yeah, this system seems to be the worst of all worlds: needlessly punishing for small players and needlessly lucrative for large ones.

The patent system, as it is implemented, clearly behaves as an instrument of power, not an instrument for fixing incentives.

I'm not here to defend the patent system. But in general, patent lawyers are your guide to that system. If you don't trust your lawyer's instincts, by all means get a second opinion! But don't just ignore their advice.

Patent examiners are given a relatively limited time/resource budget to examine applications

But they still take the money. If you take the money you should do a good job.

The $10k was his high end estimate. We thought we would try rolling the dice and see if we were getting anywhere. After the first $5k, it didn't look like we were going to luck out and end up on the low end.

Here’s the only silver lining of this: this company, GTL, will likely only ever use this patent in an on-going forever patent war against their arch-rival Securus, which is equally abhorrent in both their business and patenting practices. So in that way, it’s kind of a wash?

What a crappy patent. We really need patent reform. This is basically a patent troll (or they plan to be a gatekeeper and make money from the companies that make VR).

This company has about a 0% chance in the next 20 years of producing high quality VR. There is already prior art here.

So many ways to make patents better, including: - making it more expensive, with annual fees - increase the cost over time - just generally setting a target to reduce acceptance by 50%

Patents are ok in theory, when they promote true, material innovation via government enforced monopoly. However, the cost to society is high, so the cost should be high. And patents floating around more than 5-10 years are the ones with the most damage.

The only main counterexample is pharma. But here, it's also broken because most patents are not for groundbreaking drugs. We can also incentivize in other ways, like grants and contests (e.g. first person to cure X disease gets $1B, second person $500M).

Allowing nullification by demonstrated lack of effort to utilize the patent, relative to the means of the patent holder is my personal belief.

Under your system, would attempting to sell/license the patent to someone else count as effort-to-utilize?

Sure. Provided the new owners / licenses meet the bar for actually utilizing the patent.

>We can also incentivize in other ways, like grants and contests

You would need to quadruple healthcare r&d spending to make up for private spending (in 2018 it was 130 billion private to 43 billion public r&d spending). Not impossible, but a tough sell.

How much of that private spending went to $600k/yr lawyers rather than $60k/yr scientists?

How much of the public spending went to $60k/yr scientists rather than $600k/yr lawyers?

Afaik R&D spending really only means actual science - at least that's how R&D spending is defined for tax break purposes, so I'd imagine the stats are using the same definition.

Maaaaybe, but I've seen what a few companies count as R&D and I wouldn't be so sure. I work in a pretty traditional SwE role, not at a pharma company (I bailed on Chem long ago when I saw the salaries). By my reckoning none of what we do should be categorized as R&D, but for tax purposes almost all of it is. Both SwE hours and lawyer hours (we have a resident lawyer). It's pretty obvious when the accountants go fishing for excuses and they always seem to be able to find them.

Whenever I hear about a pharma company getting held accountable, it's for even more egregious violations (put a token lab in every building now it's all R&D wheee).

Point is: I have my doubts.

Sounds very cruel, another sign that we can't control our technological growth at all. I have a friend, a former FAANG veteran that has dedicated his life to destroying what he calls "techno-Satan", maybe he's on to something.

I have also noticed that programmers have a tendency to sometimes distrust the stuff they make. I for one will never install "smart" home devices, I'm happy with my classic light switch that won't spy my on/off status and send it to China, or my toaster that needs a monthly subscription.

It’s similar to how when Doctors receive a terminal diagnosis, they choose to just accept it and die, rather than pursue aggressive treatment.

Honestly I think we've crossed the line from compassion into Enabling.

Yeah we can maybe give your granny (with 6 months to live) another 2 years of life by taking $250,000 out of her estate and putting her through hell for 4 months, including no visitors for part of that.

I have noticed something similar on myself. I was buying a used car, so I naturally checked the new version of the same car to know what I was missing.

The new version has "always on connectivity" and an App that allowed you to know where the car was, and a bunch of other stuff.

I was so happy that my used car didn't have any of that.

People often conflate technological progress and some sort of overall bettering of society. Science/Technology have nothing, inherently, to do with morality, and people have not changed much. The future may be published by technology, but it will be written by our impulses.

We can certainly control it - this is a deliberate action by people, not an inevitability. They are 100% in control of the choices they are making here.

If we want to control that as a society, we first have to fight back in the war that's been waged for decades, claiming that any sort of "control" over what people do - even against things that are blindingly obviously bad/cruel/etc - is bad. We've been sold a bill of goods that any control over people doing bad things will simply result in the government doing bad things itself, ignoring that (a) bad things are already happening and (b) none of this moral outrage is actually very effective at stopping the government from doing bad things anyway. We need to be more active, period, in order to fight cruelty in both the public and private space.

A brief taste of freedom may be more cruel than kind, though I doubt it's cruel enough to trigger the eighth amendment. On the other hand, it does meet the standard of "unusual".

The Pythons pioneered the "comfy chair" torture technique, which was supposed to be a joke. But if got the brief use of a comfy chair then had to go back to a hard bench it would be worse than before.

Just like work from home vs returning to the office.

Yup. I've experienced the Rick & Morty perfectly level space, please don't send me back into the topsy turvy office.

Though this all seems a little insensitive to be complaining about our white color concerns when this seems to be an innovative new method to torture inmates for some reason.

“I knew it was a mistake to let them taste happiness.”

https://dilbert.com/strip/2021-05-08

Can't say I much care for the man, but when he's right, he's right.

This is similar to how some homeless people will turn down the offer of a temporary bed. Having a night in a clean bed just makes the following night feel worse. Once you're used to it, it can be easier to live with discomfort, or dull it with booze/drugs.

Yes, but is it profitable?

>A brief taste of freedom may be more cruel than kind,

The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is that it's least cruel to keep all people in solitary confinement rather than remove a single freedom.

That's obviously asinine.

I can imagine Charlie Brooke frantically taking notes for the next season of Black Mirror.

I saw something like this on Youtube.

It was a video of a woman basically going through the stages of raising her daughter and having her boyfriend come back into her life.

The end is basically her only having 30 minutes to decide for abortion and would have to sit through it again for another chance at abortion.

*Brooker

I don't recall exactly where I saw it, but I remember reading something where some tech guy "solved" the problems with prison with some nightmarish scheme of solitary confinement, Soylent(tm), and VR that he probably spend all of then minutes thinking through. That was held up an an example of how clueless and unintentionally malevolent tech people can sometimes be when they let their enthusiasm for technological solutions go unchecked by anything else.

So now that might become a real thing, brought to you by one of the shittiest and exploitative companies in existence.

Edit: here's the original article https://medium.com/@shanesnow/how-soylent-and-oculus-could-f... and this might be the critique I read: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2016/06/22/the-worst-thing-i-read...

Is there anything redeeming about “for profit” prison? At its most fundamental, it has no incentive to actually rehabilitate

No. I believe they're inherently cruel and shouldn't be legal

Absolutely 0. Worse than for profit healthcare, which is a feat.

>Is there anything redeeming about “for profit” prison?

No. But there's nothing redeeming about state prisons either. The whole system is broken regardless of who's letterhead the warden's pay stubs are on.

The typical argument for "for profit" prisons is that it provides a motive to keep costs under control, a motive that is very obviously in too short supply in most other government endeavors. Furthermore, the government is far more willing to screw its contractors to satiate public outrage (when the prisons are inevitable caught abusing prisoners and failing to deliver the services the state is paying for) than it is to screw its own departments. In my observation this breaks down in practice because of the revolving door and the government's willingness to absolve itself of responsibility for actions of its contractors and people's willingness to entertain that.

I think 3rd party contractor prisons could work in a state where the people both have high expectations of ethical behavior in both government and business AND strongly care about controlling the costs of government. The catch is that no state satisfies both those criteria as far as I can tell and state operated prisons would work just fine in any state that did so IMO it's a wash.

The reason we hear so much about for profit prisons and not the abuses within state prisons and jails is mostly one of ideological convenience. It's harder to get the people who care about prison reform to get angry at the .gov for mismanaging prisons than it is to get them angry at private contractors doing the same thing.

A few years ago I attended a presentation by a social justice evangelist. She was unmarried, black, and from LA. Some of her observations about the intersection of being all four were eye watering.

I no longer recall the statistics she cited but if you want to date a black man in LA, you first have to find one that is not in jail, which diminishes the dating pool substantially.

I'm glad that decriminalization is also including early release and voiding of criminal records but once you start down that path it's hard to walk that back. Recidivism is high not just because the same conditions exist post-incarceration, but also because finding a good job with a record is difficult. We are only really fixing things for people who were recently convicted/released and haven't had to make those kinds of choices yet.

The motivation for prison for a significant portion of US population is punishment not rehabilitation

Yeah, and then they look like Surprised Pikachu when someone gets out of prison not only with no education, but into a world where potential jobs will reject them because they've been convicted of a crime, and they have to resort to going back into crime to survive.

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public

This reminds me of one of the most heartbreaking projects I've ever stumbled across: http://photorequestsfromsolitary.org

Is this a thing where inmates in solitary want to see a specific thing, and we take pics of them and send it to them? Or is this an AI training thing?

Edit: This breaks my heart. I found the hand written notes from inmates. One guy just wants to see his kid he doesnt know, one guy wants an aerial shot of his old neighborhood so he can stroll mentally down his street, and another just wants a photo of, as he put it, "A nice looking young lady wit banging body and some tights, shorts, showing that phat ass but able to see her face and pretty eyes at the same time, she can be black or spanish or white it all cool wit me. "

I don't know how serious these folks are, or if they get the photos, but I feel motivated to at least try and indulge a few of them.

Imagine you during covid lockdown with no TV, no internet, no phone, moldy food and no one to talk to. That's how I imagine solitary is. We put people in that situation for years. It makes them literally crazy. Modern day Gulag.

Jeeeeze, "heartbreaking" is the right word.

I'm not sure if thanks is the right word, but thanks.

This is your regular reminder about Preaching To The Choir.

Telling each other about the evils of software patents might be satisfying, but it has zero effect. The proof is that they're still there after almost 30 years, and programmers have hated them from the start.

Here's the problem:

(1) lawyers, as we know, don't want to solve problems -- they want to make them part of their practice.

(2) your corporate managers have already spent millions on patents, and they listen to their lawyers.

(3) your professional associations (ACM & IEEE, looking at you here) are not on your side either. I don't know enough about their reasons to speculate here but you're free to.

Do a search on "abolish software patents." There are organizations devoted to doing that. Join one.

The EFF has a lengthy article [1] and note the date: 2012.

When I was at Google an engineer / lawyer (yes, there are a few of those) wrote up a one-page bill for Congress, declaring all software patents obvious. I picture you all asking a Congressional candidate at a town hall "Do you support abolishing software patents?" and watching him or her panic and stall, and direct their staff to look into it.

Finally, I got the "file wrapper" for this patent. It was amazingly quick: less than two years. The PTO rejected it and then they amended it, and that's pretty much all there was. These things are incredibly boring to read and I can't summarize the details in any quick way.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/06/want-abolish-software-...

Lawyers both create and solve problems.

LOL, I suppose that if I send an inmate a FB VR computer(if allowed in) I will soon join the inmate for infringement? It it has been tried before, patent any old thing -'with a VR helmet', or 'with a computer' is not patentable. Sadly many of these bad patents are granted and the patent troll ecology flourishes on...

I haven't looked into this specifically... But anytime some new prison tech or "service" comes up, take a look at who the inventor / investor / company is or belongs to. It's usually the warden or someone similar.

Can you really patent the reason you are using an existing technology?

Yeah... this was my first thought too. There is already VR avatar chat. This is not anything new.

There is a movie called "Otherlife" available on Prime that explores a bit of this question of using alternate realities in a prison context. It is slightly DIFFERENT in that the premise there is that VR can serve as the prison itself, rather than a supposed escape from it. An enjoyable watch if the premise sounds appealing to you.

This is pretty much the plan with Facebook's "Metaverse", right?

This is evil, and everyone working on these sorts of things are irredeemable.

This shouldn't be allowed. They charge an arm and a leg for these special privileges. It's totally exploitative of both the inmates and their families.

That's disgusting.

So bassicaly GTA (without the crime) on an Oculus? How is that patentable?

Too late for the lockdowns, too early for the climate catastrophe, just in time for private prisons.

The patent is little more than VR call in "controlled environment". Which presumably would also apply to schools. Or bowling alleys (been to several with VR setups). Or anywhere other than in homes.

1. A method for personalizing a virtual reality session, the method comprising: receiving, from a device located within a controlled environment, a request to initiate the virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; and initiating, based on the session initiation information and the higher priority preference, the virtual reality session.

=> A VR call in a "controlled environment" using shared hardware.

...

11. A method for initiating a virtual reality session within a controlled environment, the method comprising: receiving, from a device located within the controlled environment, a request to initiate the virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; transmitting authentication information to a monitoring system; receiving, via a network, an approval message from the monitoring system based on the authentication information; and initiating, based on the session initiation information, the higher priority preference, and the approval message, the virtual reality session.

=> A monitored version of 1.

...

19. A non-transitory computer-readable medium having instructions stored therein, which when executed by a processor in a wireless device cause the processor to perform operations, the operations comprising: receiving, from a device located within a controlled environment, a request to initiate a virtual reality session, wherein the request includes user information for a user associated with the device; responsive to receiving the request, initiating a registration process for registering the user to participate in the virtual reality session; receiving a second user request for a second device to join the virtual reality session; responsive to completing the registration process, retrieving a profile associated with the user information, wherein the profile includes first user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving a second profile associated with a user of the second device, wherein the second profile includes second user preferences for the virtual reality session; retrieving session initiation information and the first user preferences from the profile; detecting a conflict between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; determining, based on the conflict, a higher priority preference between the first user preferences and the second user preferences; and initiating, based on the session initiation information and the higher priority preference, the virtual reality session; transmitting session information to a monitoring center; and receiving, from the monitoring center, an alert associated with the session information.

=> Monitoring system plus alerts.

Here's the patent:

https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...

> 1. A method for personalizing a virtual reality session, the method comprising: [...]

Pretty sure they just described VRChat's feature of inviting a friend to join your room.

Simple Rick's!

This seems cruel.

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