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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]
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
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.
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.
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.
notice the artists getting ripped off are never mentioned in those equations
sure they are. i post all the time complaining about how the riaa refuses to pay artists the money they deserve, and uses their illegally-gotten and abused monopoly power to strong arm artists into unfair record contracts, followed up by their tried-and-true, proven method of routinely "forgetting" to pay even the pittance they racketeered the artists into agreeing to.
that is, in fact, one of the things that I believe DOES justify infringing the copyrights held by the riaa; the fact that all the hollering the riaa does about "the artists" is done to support a system that has historically, systematically, and categorically used to "legally" rip artists off year-after-year without fail.
i'm with you man; i post about this all the time, what the heck are you talking about when you say "never mentioned"?
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.