grandmother jailed for...

In the posting below, I go after the tired copyfighter rhetoric that results in almost every discussion of digital copyright eventually making reference to some poor guild of buggy whip manufacturers who saw their business decimated with the introduction of the motorized carriage (no whips required). I happen to know that Phineas J. Snide, owner of the Acme Buggy Whip company was so upset by the crumbling future for his business that he attempted to shoot himself. A whip-man, he was a terrible shot with a gun. The bullet missed his temple, smashed through his window and into the ground outside his rural Texas home, rupturing an oil deposit that made him one of the earliest multi-millionaires of the newfound auto industry. Let's leave the buggy whippers to rest. They did okay, and managed to even stay in the personal transportation encouragement business.

As we head into another blissful summer long weekend, I am wondering about another popular rhetorical figure of the copyfight -- that grandmother jailed for the illegal downloading performed on her computer by her grandkids. I hear about her all the time -- how the American DMCA encourages the jailing of teenagers and grandmothers, and how Canada's Bill C-61 will do the same (Canadian grandmothers, boo!). Apparently, this grandmother paid her ISP bill, which made her the person of record on the offending computer, so when the big bad RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) was looking for their next victim, she was it.

Who is this grandmother? What's her name? Is she in jail?

I did a whole bunch of research googling to find out, but so far I have come up with not much at all. In the process, I discovered that lots of grandmothers do all sorts of nasty things, and go to jail for doing them. Apparently, being generation one of three is NOT always a motivation for exceptional behaviour.

Please, if you know the grandmother in question, or of her, I'd be very interested in learning her full story. My comment stream is open to you.

I happen to agree that paying an ISP bill is not a nasty thing, and I also agree that certain corporate copyright holders have taken really incorrigible legal missteps in their attempts to protect the value of the intellectual property they own. In my google travels, I note several recent (recent? 2005? does that count as recent?) US legal decisions that have tempered the legal dangers everyone seems to be so afraid of from the DMCA (and by extension -- thank you Michael Geist -- from C-61).

Is there a DMCA grandmother Gitmo? And if so, is it so secret that even Google can't find it? Considering Google knows what flowers my girlfriend grows in her garden, I just assumed they knew everything.