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The 83-Year-Old Dead File Swapper
93,000 writes "Gertrude Walton, a deceased eighty-three-year-old woman, was named as the only defendant in a federal lawsuit filed by a group of record companies. They claimed Walton made more than 700 pop, rock and rap songs available for free on the Internet under the screen name 'smittenedkitten.' Needless to say, the suit has since been dropped."
Shouldn't they be held liable (for more than just court fees) for wasting our justice system's already limited time with junk like this? After all, this isn't the first time something like this has happened :/
Matt
You have 1 Moderator Point! Use it or lose it! Is that a threat? -vapid
Since she (obviously) didn't offer those files for download, and since this isn't the first such case of mistaken identity in these matters, doesn't this negatively affect the RIAA's potential success in future lawsuits?
Of course, I don't think anyone's been convicted of anything yet--people have only settled out of court, right?
[insert witty sig here]
Did they say she was deceased before the file sharing occured or *after*? Man, I might want to think about settling if the RIAA is gonna send assassins after me for sharing.
The RIAA/MPAA/etc. have been making fortunes off dead people's backs for decades, it would be a logical next step to eventually extend this to dead customers.
carry on...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
yeah, because when my mom dies, the very most important thing for me at that point will be to make the RIAA look silly. I'll want to actually show up in court with the bother and hassle that involves, show the judge the document, and get my kicks out of my mom's death. Yeah. That's what I'd do.[/sarcasm]
One wonders how a big, powerful law firm staffed with smart people could have made such an enormous blunder, if in fact Jenner & Block was the firm doing the work on this.
I'd be interested to find out how many lawyers the RIAA employs and/or keeps on retainer.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
IANAL (Surprise, surprise, surprise!), but I'd think the judge would be rather upset if one of the parties could have taken simple, reasonable, steps, that would have a good chance of the suit being dropped before hogging the court's time. Faxing a death certificate looks like a simple, reasonable, step. (Personally, I'dve sent a notarized copy by registered mail as well).
Armed with that evidence, the defense would probably have a good chance at having the case dropped with prejudice by a pissed off judge if the plaintiff decided to pursue it anyway.
You could've hired me.
The whole legal strategy of the RIAA is to settle out of court and that's harder to do with a dead person. They know full well taking it to trial would not be in their best interests.
if she was alive, she probably would have had to settle (i.e. pay RIAA money) because if she's like most people, she wouldn't be able to afford to go to the court simply to defend herself.
They exist for only ONE purpose. To keep the RIAA around.
Long dead musicians or fools who signed their rights away are the RIAA's stoc in thare.
Anything 'new' is hyped, churned, produced in such a way as to bankrupt he musician (see/hear Wall*Mart,) and put into the remainder bin.
That's why you have Golden Oldies stations.
It ain't good music. Its merely the most profitable.
The RIAA is to music what a Mortician is to a beauty parlor.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
My guess is she was probably responsible for taking care her Mom's estate. Not responding to the RIAA would just make things more difficult. She would have to make sure the Estate was represented in court. Worse case scenario, they sue the Estate and end up taking everything (if she had anything left) that should have gone to her family.
Beware of Sleestak
ALL of the RIAA's lawsuits are PR cases. What, you think they need the money? It's all a bogus dog and pony show designed to impose guilt and fear on those who enjoy music and aren't slaves to the RIAA's (exploitative) distribution channels.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
I love this effort to discredit all file-sharing suits by pointing out the few that are off-target.
Well, yeah. The RIAA is trying to track down anonymous people against whom they have a legitimate beef, but just because they have valid complaints doesn't mean they have a valid complaint against you.
Lawsuits are extremely disruptive, and it's vitally important that the RIAA know who it's suing. If I were to be sued by the RIAA, I have the choice of a lengthy defense (expensive in both my time and money for a lawyer, with no guarantee that I'll get it back when I win), or settling.
This is not an ordinary accident. They didn't just send out a mistaken cease-and-desist letter. They filed a lawsuit, and had she been alive to get it, the very next thing she'd have had to do is spend a few hundred dollars on a lawyer. The RIAA may be able to file lawsuits out of petty cash, but real people don't have lawyers on retainer, or a staff of people to handle suits.
When you're filing lawsuits against people and you haven't bothered to verify who they are, it says to me that you have an awful lot of money and you don't care who you hurt in the process. Morally, I have to weigh the incidental damage you're causing against the legitimate harm done to you, and in this case I find the RIAA very wanting.
Note that I'm not one of those "socialist free information" types. I support copyrights and even patents. The RIAA must not simply have a legitimate case: they have to have THE legitimate case. If they're just hoping to cow people into settling to make a buck, they're less sinned against than sinning.
Incidents like this suggest that they are doing precisely that. I agree that they have a valid case, but they're losing the moral high ground rapidly.
Yeah, and it makes me wonder, how many of these damn lawsuits are even the right people? How can we trust they're not just suing anyone without even going through proper investigative procedure to see if their data is accurate?
I get the feeling they don't care. Just grab an IP off the log and sue it. Who cares if it's the actual file sharer or not, we deserve compensation.
The lawsuit was filed, probably because someone using her computer or somehow connected to her in some way, it was found that she was dead and couldn't possibly be the one, and so the suit was dropped.
Why is this news? Is it so Slashdotters can hoot and holler about a suit that was already dropped? Obviously the wrong people will occassionally get named in these things due to the nature of IPs and the Internet.
Are we supposed to laugh at how dumb we think the RIAA is for going after individual downloaders, even though it's EXACTLY WHAT SLASHDOTTERS (including CmdrTaco) SAID THEY SHOULD DO back in 2000 during the Napster lawsuits?
Is it okay to violate music copyrights? If so, does that mean nobody should bitch in the next "GPL source code theft" article?
Just asking questions. With things like the iTunes store (.99 per song) and other online services, it's pretty silly to be justifying music piracy these days with excuses about how expensive and evil you think the RIAA is (notice the artists getting ripped off are never mentioned in those equations).
No, I'm being serious. If she had any estate of any value, even just a house worth say $50,000 - $100,000 - a claim can be made against the estate. There is a period of time after the death that any claims can be made (usually medical bills, etc.). Once that time period has past, the no claims can be made. That's why lawyers often get involved with Estates, especially if the person that died was well off (and a paid-off house, even if it is of modest value, is worth protecting).
Once the claim is made, the Estate can not be settled until it is settled, even if it takes several years. IMHO, her Daughter was wise respond to the RIAA, otherwise things could end up getting ugly.
Beware of Sleestak
Bad bad bad bad bad idea. This civil lawsuit was dropped by the RIAA of their own free will, and could have proceeded against the estate of the deceased regardless of her livelihood. They dropped it as a PR matter and because an 83-year-old obviously almost certainly didn't share 700 mp3s on the Internet. Had they wanted to and had they the proof to do it, the RIAA could have pursued the matter against old Gerdy's estate. What you are suggesting would make your heirs one very poor lot of people.
Remember kids: Capitalism bad. Socialist free information good. No one needs to get paid.
Ri-iiight because every time grandma downloaded an MP3, the music industry had to pay $15...
Long before the internet and CD's there was something called radio, and people used to use this silly mechanism called a tape recorder, to tape songs from the radio. And there was a huge hue and cry about how this was costing the "artists" money. "Piracy" will NEVER end, but it doesn't cost the industry anything. IT IS MONEY THEY NEVER HAD and it is also MONEY THEY WILL NEVER HAVE. How this can be a "cost" is beyond me...potential profit does not exist, it's an accounting fallacy. If they want to sell more albums they have to do like any other business and drop their price, or create a product that more people want.
You can't force me to buy something I don't wan't, and you can't "protect" a few million bytes in a computer memory or anywhere else. If you can read them and make sense of them, so can I. Technically humming your favorite tune is also a copyright violation.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Although the article says that this woman was computer illiterate and "objected to having computers," it never actually says that there wasn't a computer in her house. It's curious that although the article spends a lot of time talking about how she didn't like/know about them, it never explicitly states that she didn't have one in the house. It also states that she had family members living with her, and that she has 24 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren. Odds are that one of them were using her internet account for file-sharing, so she was busted for it. The fact that they filed the suit even though they had already received a copy of the death certificate can be attributed to the ordinary bureaucratic mix-ups that happen routinely in large offices, and shouldn't surprise anyone who has ever worked for a company with more than ten employees.
I don't see the point of this being on slashdot.