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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.
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
'accidental'
let this be a lesson to all!
*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]
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
Her officially recorded cause of death is available on Kazaa
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
P2P is the killer app!
~X~
*bang* flop.
~X~
http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/ stories/2005/01/14/20050114wacnethaway.html
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.
Bullet wound to the back of the head while her hands were tied behind her back. The body was first discovered by RIAA lawyers, and the death was ruled a suicide.
When you download MP3s, you're downloading rigor mortis.
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
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..."
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.