Death is no escape


iconAll those lawsuits the RIAA is filing against file traders don't seem to be based on very hard evidence. After years of going after 12-year olds and grandmothers, the RIAA is suing a dead woman who hates computers.

Lawyers representing several record companies have filed suit against an 83 year-old woman who died in December, claiming that she made more than 700 songs available on the internet.

"I believe that if music companies are going to set examples they need to do it to appropriate people and not dead people," Robin Chianumba told AP. "I am pretty sure she is not going to leave Greenwood Memorial Park to attend the hearing."

Gertrude Walton, who lived in Beckley, West Virginia hated computers, too, her daughter adds. An RIAA spokesperson said that it would try and dismiss the case.

However the RIAA's embarrassment doesn't end there. Chianumba said that she had sent a copy of her mother's death certificate to record company lawyers in response to an initial warning letter, over a week before the suit was filed. In 2003 the RIAA sued a twelve year-old girl for copyright infringement. She'd harbored an MP3 file of her favorite TV show on her hard drive. Her working class parents in a housing project in New York were forced to pay two thousand dollars in a settlement.

Could it be that their standards for filing a lawsuit are just a tad bit too low?



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Comments

In case you thought no-one appreciated the "An RIAA spokesperson said that it would try..." I did - Laughed really hard.

Posted by: Dean at February 8, 2005 6:33 PM

"Could it be that their standards for filing a lawsuit are just a tad bit too low?"

More like the intelligence standards for litigation lawyers are a tad bit too low....but we already knew that, didn't we?

Posted by: Robert Garrard at February 8, 2005 7:38 PM

There's no cost to filing a lawsuit that isn't firmly based on facts - so they go ahead and file, and if they guessed wrong, the defendant still bears the cost of bringing out the facts.

There should be a requirement to post $5,000 bond before even sending out a letter threatening a lawsuit - the target automatically gets this to cover the cost of hiring a lawyer to find out if there's even anything to worry about.

Posted by: markm at February 13, 2005 11:45 AM

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