Lily Allen Pirates Music, Is Clueless About Copyright
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 wrong, we called her a hypocrite. Even celebrity guru Perez Hilton agreed with this assessment, and it seems that Lily is more of a 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 her 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.
Also, this is not the only infringement on her blog. While she’s trying to point out how much damage ‘pirates’ do to the music industry she blatantly infringed the copyrights of a number of newspapers by posting scanned articles.
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.
Please Lily, explain to us why it is okay for you to copy, paste and pirate others work, while you label people who do the same as thieves? Are we missing something here, or do you really think that copyright is limited to your own music?
What about the poor people working at the newspapers who might lose their job because you are pasting scanned articles online? Not to mention the poor artists that ended up on your mixtape who’s lives are ruined because of your selfish actions.
Update: Lily Allen killed her weblog and career.
