mdwh2's Journal: UK Artist Lobbies Against Piracy; Gets Exposed As A Pirate

Lily Allen joined in the filesharing debate, giving her support to the planned "three strikes" UK law to disconnect suspected filesharers from the Internet, creating a (now deleted) blog in order to convince people how filesharing is stealing, and how much harm it causes. But she was exposed as a filesharing pirate herself, having made "mixtapes" of other artists' music in order to promote her own career, and the mp3s were still on her website until after she was found out. She also plagiarised an article in her first post. In defence, she said she "didn't have a knowledge of the workings of the music industry" and "I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS THAT I WASNT TRYING TO PASS OF THOSE WORDS AS MY OWN". She has now stepped down from the debate.

The Featured Artists Coalition has now joined support with Lily Allen, supporting the law, albeit calling for "the restriction of the infringers bandwidth to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical" rather than total disconnection. They claim this would leave "basic email and web access functional", which seems unfeasible given how even daily web use can add up to 10s or 100s MBs, let alone the size of essential Windows Update security downloads, or other software that needs security updates. It would also unfairly discriminate between kinds of copyrighted material - sharing smaller files such as copyrighted photographs, software applications, or indeed articles plagiarised from Techdirt, would still be possible.

The Government consultation ends 29 September.