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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."
"Walton could not be reached for comment."
Unknown host pong.
Man, the RIAA is getting soft.
one way to keep from getting sued for swapping mp3s.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
She's also reported to have voted in the last presidential election in OH.
I'm a big tall mofo.
file trading kills.
Scrame: Sunglasses are for assholes.
Does anyone know what the officially recorded cause of death was?
From the article: Chianumba said she faxed a copy of her mother's death certificate to record company officials several days before the lawsuit was filed. She said she did that in response to a letter from the company regarding the upcoming legal filing.
She should have let the whole thing go to court. It would make the RIAA look far sillier when a computer illiterate dead woman's name is cleared in front of a judge rather than before hand.
Trolling is a art,
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
if there is now a way that this can be used to stop these kinds of lawsuits althogether, in that it shows that the whole concept of going after file swappers in this way is bogus.
|>>?
that file swapping is a grave matter.
*shudder* The horror... the horror...
I guess she was "smittened" with something terminal.
Ha hee heh hee... computers... terminal... I crack me up. :-)
--- Ban humanity.
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]
Bah, she probably just faked her death to escape freaking **AA. I know I would.
Cozinha para as massas (e para geeks)
This proves what I've been saying for months. RIAA will kill you if you share more than 700 songs on a P2P application.
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.
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.
In more than a handful of cases, the record industry has sued a person for file-swapping, then later learned that they were really after the defendant's child or grandchild.
Chianumba said she faxed a copy of her mother's death certificate to record company officials several days before the lawsuit was filed. She said she did that in response to a letter from the company regarding the upcoming legal filing.
"I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do it to appropriate people and not dead people," Chianumba said. "I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park [where she is buried] to attend the hearing. I don't know if this is a scheme to get money, I just don't know what's going on. I am concerned."
- advertisement-
When Walton died on Dec. 11 after a long illness, she was survived by eight children, 24 grandchildren and 23 great-grandchildren, according to her obituary.
Could smittenedkitten be one of them? The RIAA declined to say.
To contact staff writer Toby Coleman, use e-mail or call 348-5156.
Linux Wireless Hardware in the UK
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
WTF? She told me she was 18, blonde, slender and hot!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I personally lament Gertrude's passing away. What a great memorial. Just prior to death, put a file server away in a hidden closet in a house with many years of ISP paid for in advance. Serve up those files with no possible recourse from RIAA and other leeches. Maybe a foundation could be started such that the file repository is transferred from near-death person to near-death person. As the slow wheels of the RIAA start legal proceedings, the person becomes beyond even their reach. Not so much the "make a wish" foundation as the "make a statement" foundation.
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
Just because some old lady died they're not going to sue her anymore?
This needs legislation!
Just because you die doesn't mean that you shouldn't be sued!
This
What's the point indeed.
Despite what the ravenous morons on this site will now scream, the RIAA was collecting information and planning BEFORE she died. They just happened to file the lawsuit AFTER she died. They got the wrong person, yes, but it's only coincidence that she happened to be dead by the time they actually filed the suit.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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
http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/ stories/2005/01/14/20050114wacnethaway.html
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 got the wrong person, yes, but it's only coincidence that she happened to be dead by the time they actually filed the suit.
But it was not a coincidence that she was the wrong person (actually they knew she was dead because the death certificate was sent to record officials before the suit was filed, they are even more ridiculous).
When you download MP3s, you're downloading rigor mortis.
On Thursday, a spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America acknowledged that Walton was probably not the smittenedkitten it is searching for.
Weak-minded fool!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
great I can just hear the RIAA ad now.
This was a civil, not a criminal case. In the event that the RIAA had won the case, any judgement would have been awarded against the defendants estate. You don't need to be alive to be sued in civil court.
The RIAA didn't need to drop the case just because the defendant was dead.
However, this was mostly a PR case. The lawsuite was not filed with the purpose of recovering damages. The real reason they filed the case was as a PR suit to make an example of the person and with the person being dead, the only PR results would have been to make them look like bigger scum than they already do. That's why they withdrew the case.
Mmmm.. Donuts
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.
She won't be trying THAT again!
Remember: Every time you share a song, a kitten dies...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
They can bury me in a pine box for all I care.
Instead of a tombstone, I think that a life-size statue of myself sitting on a horse with a sword in my hand would be cool.
Facing forward on the horse would be a plus.
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 article seems to indicate that this woman had no knowledge of how her computer was used. HOWEVER, I support the idea of posthumously trading files as a statement.
First, what's the statement?
* file traders don't profit from their trading
* the agencies pursuing traders do so with no concern for their customers
* that even 'respectable' old people object to the current IP system
Perhaps there are other statements, but those were the first that came to mind.
Yes, I could see devoting my last few days on earth to that cause. I like it a lot better than giving my money to starving people who are just going to die anyway, for example.
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"?
she only died on December 11
Only? That seems like a fairly important event of a lifetime to me.
I'm just glad Walton had the balls to demand a trial rather than knuckling under and paying the typical $3,000 settlement.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
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.
There *is* a legal transgression that is taking place daily and it is impacting the industry in an enormous way. The courts have sided almost exclusively with the consumer (thankfully we haven't started to lose that many civil rights yet), and the RIAA has only one course of action left open to it: lawsuits.
Look EMI sent my ISP a nastygram that resulted in my losing internet service for a week. I work from home so this was a real hardship. I had never heard of the bands listed, the IP address listed wasn't even being used at the time, and I've never downloaded a song at home*. Music just doesn't matter much to me.
*I downloaded a public domain performance of a public domain song from Napster when they first started at work just to show my boss how cool the technology was.
Now lets look at losses: about $1000 for me, about $300 in customer acquisition costs for the ISP I dumped for not informing me of the letter they got before cutting off service. For EMI, $1. They obviously just did some brain dead port scan and hired someone not capable of cut and paste to write the nastygram.
This is a case that never went past the nasty-gram stage, just immagine the legal transgressions they are committing on the scale of our economy... I will gladly join a class action against them when it comes. They are impacting the nation in an enormous way. There is only one course of action left open to freedom loving Americans: lawsuits.
As I understand it though, the RIAA has constructed a "repent" clause in to all of their suits which gives you a get-out-of-jail free card in return for a signed promise of non-recidivism.
The innocent are the most impacted by this type of "repent" clause, it reminds me of our broken criminal "justice" system. Punish the innocent, pardon the guilty. It's just not right.
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.
Is it okay to violate music copyrights?
Yes. Just like it's okay to smoke weed. Copyright and prohibition are both wrong. They put the manufacture and distribution into the hands of criminals. I'd rather not deal with criminals. Real businesses have better quality control.
If so, does that mean nobody should bitch in the next "GPL source code theft" article?
Yes. "GPL source code theft" is impossible. There's nothing to stop anyone from using, sharing, giving, selling it. With that in mind, how is any megacorp that "stole" the code going to make their millions from it? How are they going to keep me from getting the source?
Obviously the wrong people will occassionally get named in these things due to the nature of IPs and the Internet.
And you consider THAT okay?? I find copyright violations a little less offensive(a lot actually) than the legal system being used to harass innocent people.
(notice the artists getting ripped off are never mentioned in those equations).
You are quite the redundant one aren't you? They are mentioned all the time. I've pointed that out before, and you chose to misinterpret that back then also.(How soon they forget...)
What?
The two guys would stand in line with the public, and tell lawyer jokes at the lawyers as they exercised their special privilege.
It was a form of protest: it is unfair that "some people are more special than others".
Which, frankly, I can agree with.
How would you deal this: some idiot decides to self-represent ("In propria persona"). Do you grant him an ID badge to bypass screening? Do you declare him a first-class citizen or a second-class citizen?
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"