The RIAA has now brought suit against a stroke victim in Michigan in Warner v. Paladuk.
See copy of summons (pdf). Although the defendant John Paladuk, an employee of C&N Railroad for 36 years, was living in Florida at the time of the alleged copyright infringement, and had notified the RIAA that he had not engaged in any copyright infringement, and despite that the fact that Mr. Paladuk suffered a stroke last year which resulted in complete paralysis of his entire left side and severely impaired speech, rendering him disabled, and despite the fact that his disability check is his sole source of income, the RIAA commenced suit against him on February 27, 2007. Suing the disabled is not new to the RIAA. Both Atlantic v. Andersen in Oregon and Elektra v. Schwartz in Brooklyn, New York, both brought against disabled people who have never engaged in file sharing and whose sole income is Social Security Disability, are still pending. The local Michigan lawyer being used by the RIAA in the Paladuk case is the same lawyer who was accused by a 15 year old girl of telling her what to say at her deposition in Motown v. Nelson and, in the Warner v. Scantlebury case, after the defendant died during the lawsuit, indicating to the court that he was going to give the family “60 days to grieve”, after which time he was going to start deposing the late Mr. Scantlebury’s children. The RIAA’s practice of attacking “single moms, widows, grandmothers, dead people and children” has recently been pointed out by the well known comic strip FoxTrot by Bill Amend.