Lily Allen No Longer in Favor Of Kicking People Offline… Just Cutting Back Their Bandwidth
Oh she’s a tit! And a pirate to boot! Or should that be Oh she’s a boot and a pirate tit?
Lily Allen No Longer in Favor Of Kicking People Offline… Just Cutting Back Their BandwidthWell, this is getting particularly silly now. Despite claiming that she wasn’t going to the meeting of various musicians in the UK to discuss Peter Mandelson’s “three strikes” proposal, Lily Allen apparently did show up and said that kicking people offline was too draconian. This is, at least, a modest victory for those of us who questioned her stance. Still… it wasn’t a wholesale shift. The musicians instead still agreed to support a similar three strikes plan, that just had a slightly less onerous “final solution,” involving taking away most of a user’s bandwidth: * “Our meeting voted to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter, and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringers’ bandwith to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic e-mail and web access functional.” * That’s still a pretty big overreaction to such things — especially since none of these artists have been able to respond to the basic questionsposed by many of us, asking for *any* evidence that the problem they face is actually unauthorized file sharing, rather than a shift in technologies and business models. Again, as we’ve pointed out countless times, the size of the overall UK music industry is *growing*, not shrinking, and those who have put in place business models that embrace file sharing have seen their own markets grow, not shrink. So, it’s hard to see how the claim that “file sharing” harms the industry squares with reality. Instead, it sounds like a failure to adapt a business model is harming some artists, while other, smarter artists are doing just fine. * The group also condemned the vitriol that Allen had faced on an internet blog that she had set up to argue against music piracy. * Now, I certainly condemn any such “vitriol” as well, but again, nearly every comment I saw on the later posts on her blog were quite well thought out and well-argued. There was a lot of silly and condemnable comments on her earlier posts, but later posts brought up very good questions — all of which Lily refused to respond to. So, I’m still having trouble believing that she shut down the blog due to any vitriol — even if the press seems to be accepting that claim uncritically. It’s also quite telling that she shut down the blog just after attention was brought to the fact that Lily herself was sharing a ton of musicin the form of mixtapes. It still seem…»»
