Slashdot Mirror
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."
Here is the story as a coral cache. I could only get the first page to cache propery before the slashdotting. This Print link might work however.
February 04, 2005
Deceased woman named in file-sharing suit
By Toby Coleman
Staff writer
Gertrude Walton of Fayette County hated computers, her daughter said.
That did not stop the recording industry from accusing the now deceased 83-year-old Mount Hope woman of illegally trading music over the Internet.
More than a month after Walton was buried in Beckley, a group of record companies named her as the only defendant in a federal lawsuit. They claimed Walton made more than 700 pop, rock and rap songs available for free on the Internet under the screen name "smittenedkitten."
- advertisement-
On Thursday, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America acknowledged that Walton was probably not the smittenedkitten it is searching for.
"Our evidence gathering and our subsequent legal actions all were initiated weeks and even months ago," said RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy. "We will now, of course, obviously dismiss this case."
Walton's daughter, Robin Chianumba, lived with her mother for the last 17 years of her life and said her mother objected to having a computer in the house. Chianumba said she didn't know anything about the record company's claims. And she said she does not know anything about the screen name.
"My mother was computer illiterate. She hated a computer," Chianumba said. "My mother wouldn't know how to turn on a computer."
The case demonstrates the imperfections of the record industry's two-year old effort to hunt down and sue people who put hundreds, even thousands, of copyrighted songs onto file-sharing networks on the Internet.
The industry tracks down file-swappers using the Internet Protocol addresses attached to their relatively anonymous screen names.
The IP addresses are useful because they identify computers on the Internet. But investigators cannot use the numeric codes to figure out who is using a particular computer. Often, they can only use the IP address to learn who is getting billed for the computer's Internet service.