Stupid Patent Of The Month: Infamous Prison Telco Patents Asking Third-Parties For Money

Author(s): 
Publication Type: 
Other Writing
Publication Date: 
November 25, 2015

Plenty of businesses rely on third-party payers: parents often pay for college; insurance companies pay most health care bills. Reaching out to potential third-party payers is hardly a new or revolutionary business practice. But someone should tell the Patent Office. Earlier this year, it issued US Patent No. 9,026,468 to Securus Technologies, a company that provides telephone services to prisoners. The patent covers a method of "proactively establishing a third-party payment account." In other words, Securus patented the idea of finding someone to pay a bill.

It's been an interesting few weeks for Securus. First, the FCC announced that in response to price gouging by the industry, it would impose per-minute price caps on prison calls. Then The Intercept reported on a massive hack of recorded Securus calls: 70 million recordings, including many calls made under attorney-privilege, were leaked through SecureDrop. We'd like to add November's Stupid Patent of the Month award.

Securus' patent has a single independent claim with three steps. These steps are: 1) identifying a "prospective third-party payer"; 2) detecting a "campaign triggering event" (this can be something like an inmate being booked into a facility); and 3) "initiating a campaign to proactively contact" the prospective third-party payer using an "interactive voice response system." In other words, when an inmate gets booked into the local jail, Securus robocalls a family member to ask if they are willing to set up a pre-paid phone account.

Read the full post at Tech Dirt