Deceased woman named in file-sharing suit

Found on Charleston Gazette on Friday, 04 February 2005
Browse Filesharing

Gertrude Walton of Fayette County hated computers, her daughter said.

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."

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."

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.

Every day, there's a new problem with those lawsuits. The industry should stop their crusade, which is doing more harm than good to everybody (if there wasn't the greed). I am a little disappointed that the industry gave up so easily. Perhaps she faked her own death to avoid a lawsuit? Some people are desperate, you know...