Digging Up Defendants

It looks like the RIAA has found the elusive file sharing culprit!

Gertrude Walton was recently targeted by the recording industry in a lawsuit that accused her of illegally trading music over the Internet. But Walton died in December after a long illness, and according to her daughter, the 83-year-old hated computers.

More than a month after Walton was buried in Beckley, a group of record companies named her as the sole defendant in a federal lawsuit, claiming she made more than 700 pop, rock and rap songs available for free on the Internet under the screen name "smittenedkitten."

Chianumba said she faxed a copy of her mother's death certificate to record company officials several days before the lawsuit was filed, 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."

A Recording Industry Association of America spokesman said Thursday that Walton was likely not the smittenedkitten it is searching for.

It's hard to take the RIAA or blood sucking trial lawyers seriously as it is; it's things like this that make them absolutely contemptible.