Music Thread #2 For 9/24/09: Lily Allen Fails Today Like No Other

Up until this post, I contained positive feelings for Lily Allen. Though not a fan, since I really only followed her after an impressive combination with Common, I thought she was sensible cool artist with somewhat of an informed, global perspective.

Then I read this and realized how much of an idiot she is.

File-sharing heroine Lily Allen has joined the anti-piracy lobby in its war against illegal downloading, claiming that it bankrupts the music industry. While trying to prove her point, however, she infringed on the rights of several webblogs and newspapers. On top of this, it turns out that she offers some illegal mixtapes on one of her websites.

After we found out that Lily Allen copied an article from Techdirt without attribution or permission to prove why copyright infringement is wring, we called her a hypocrite. Even celebrity guru Perez Hilton agreed with this assessment, and it seems that Lily is more hypocrite than we could have ever imagined.

In a reply to our criticism Lily wrote the following blog entry in which she entirely missed the point we tried to make.

“I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS [sic] THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN , HERE IS A LINK TO THE WEBSIITE I ACQUIRED THE PIECE FROM.”

Judging from here response it is “quite obvious” that Lily doesn’t have a clue about copyright. Lily seems to argue that we accused her of plagiarism, but we only meant to point out that she infringed on Techdirt’s copyright by copy/pasting their article without attribution.

And she did.

Allen is only the second music artist that I can ever recall complaining about pirate downloading on the internet. Dr.Dre was the other, and he long, LONG ago gave up that fight, realizing there was nothing he could do about it.

Yet Allen, who isn't like this global superstar that races up Twitter's trending topics every second she makes news (as evidence by even Hilton tweeting about her and yet, no sign of her), joins this unpopular and asinine position of defending the corrupt and bullying RIAA without even knowing that she really is defending a shady organization.

It was already bad enough then for her to take that stance. But it is even more egregious that she was basically stealing content herself while being ignorant of it.

Again, as I have said it time and time again, the music industry payed the price for not addressing it when Napstar went down and look even more ridiculous, petty, and oppressive whenever they try to halt pirate downloading by suing college kids who usually don't have the money to pay these incongruous fines (though some schools look worse for not defending them).

Oh, and look what else Allen did, and see how stupid she has made herself appear after all of this:

To make things even more absurd Techdirt discovered that Lily is pirating music herself by offering some unauthorized mixtapes (tape 1 and tape 2) on her website LilyAllenMusic.com. The tracklist of one of the mixtapes reveals a list of no less than 19 unauthorized tracks. This means the RIAA can easily sue her for millions.

The irony of being ignorant and stupid.

That fits the description today of Lily Allen, no question.

Update: It also appears that Elton John is apart of the greedy, irrational side as well......Great.

Over the past months the UK government has tried to tackle the issue of online piracy. This has resulted in a proposal from Lord Mandelson, who plans to disconnect alleged file sharers without any judicial process. His plans are backed by several musicians, Sir Elton John being the latest to join the lobby.

Out of touch music artist come in all shapes and sizes, don't they.