Lily Allen – ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’
p2pnet news view Music | Politics:- Well I finally figured out who Lily Allen is.
Truth be told, I’d never heard of her before a recent p2pnet article [ Lily Allen disses P2P file sharing ] about her sucking up to Britain’s Lord Mandelson and his doomed-to-failure fight against ‘piracy’.
Let me be very clear here: the fact that the mainstream media’s latest “flavor of the month” fails to understand p2p, copyright reform, or ‘free culture’ in general shouldn’t surprise anybody in the least. Celebrities are supposed to be vapid and willing to repeat whatever their corporate paymasters want them to repeat.
All of our cherished illusions about celebrities being ‘rebellious’ went out the window the day Metallica decided to help their corporate handers destroy Napster. (The fact that, before they signed, they’d been a taper-friendly band who’d developed their fanbase by encouraging fans to make copies of their tape and give it to friends somehow never came up.
(Yes, Virginia, if you encourage fans to “tape and trade”, and then get all pissy when they do the same exact thing on a larger scale, you’re hypocrites.)
When you’ve spent your entire career cultivating the image of being bad-ass and “anti-establishment’, and then suddenly turn up in Congressional hearings designed to ‘protect’ the corporate “Establishment” record industry from any kind of competition whatsoever, you’re a damn fool.
Skip ahead ten years, and Lars is gleefully admitting he hopes Metallica stuff ends up on the p2p networks because it means exposure. (Way to shit where you eat, Lars! Declare yourself to be p2p’s biggest enemies, and then count on p2p users to ‘publicize’ your ass when nobody takes you seriously anymore. Astonishing!)
The hypocrisy gets deeper. Did anybody see Metallica’s Youtube channel? They’re encouraging Youtube users to do “cover” versions of Metallica songs, which then get featured on Metallica’s Youtube page.
(To their credit, they ALSO went to bat for the Metallica/Beatles parody-band “Beatallica”, so they’re not all bad.)
The problem is, Metallica just can’t seem to wrap their minds around the new culture. They’re the taper-friendly band who helped kill the first p2p distribution system (Napster). Maybe they deserve thanks for that, because if they and their corporate paymasters hadn’t panicked and killed Napster, the p2p thing might have been ‘tamed’. The “free culture” movement would probably never have happened. Now, with every draconian ‘law’ they manage to pass (that utterly fails to stop — or even impact — so-called “piracy”), they just dig their own graves a little deeper.
So where does Lily Allen come in?
Well, before we — rightly — consign her to the scrapheap of history for her total misunderstanding of p2p ‘piracy’ and new buddy-buddy relationship with Mandelson, take a look at THIS »»»
This part of the site is dedicated to fan mixes of the tracks on Lily’s album ‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’. When you purchase a copy of the album on CD you gain exclusive access to MP3s of the individual parts that make up each track on the album. These individual parts of a song are called track ’stems’, for example there will be a bass track, a vocal track and a drum track. You can download these stems in order to remix any track from the album. You can remix as many tracks from the album as many times as you want and upload as many as you like. You can mix them up in any way you see fit as well – dropping in new samples, beats or vocals etc or by taking away track parts, it’s up to you.
That’s right, folks, the same woman who is busily slagging the percieved evils of ‘internet piracy’ on her blog and cozying up to entertainment-industry lackeys in the British government is also frantically trying to cash in on the very ‘remix culture’ she wants to kill.
If you buy a physical copy of the CD, you get “exclusive access” to mp3’s of the individual source tracks (Not even FLAC). The sad part of this is, it’s evidently working, judging by the number of remixes mentioned on the page.
What lessons should we take from this, friends?
1. The “music industry” (read: RIAA member corporations) have absolutely nothing to offer. Whether it’s their desperate attempts to cash in on an emerging ‘remix culture’ that’s already made them obsolete, or the fact that “D.J. Dangermouse” — the guy responsible for the infamous Grey Album — produced an album with Beck Hansen, or Lars Ulrich’s barely-verbal acknowledgement that p2p ‘piracy’ is an extremely valuable publicity tool — no matter which way you look at it, the corporate “music industry” is simultaneously terrified of, and UTTERLY DEPENDENT UPON the emerging p2p/copyright-reform/remix/free-culture scene, and they know it.
2. They’ve also realized they have no chance of actually stopping the shift, now. In hindsight, if they’d allowed Napster to work out some kind of licensing deal, they could have shepherded the emerging p2p scene, maybe carved themselves some kind of niche. Now, thanks to their blundering and completely inept crusade of lawsuits, misinformation and harrassment, they’re completely and utterly dependent on an emerging culture they barely understand, and they can’t control, or even influence — except to maybe piss it off more. There’s NOTHING the RIAA member corporations can do to get back into the good graces of the p2p scene, let alone it’s more ‘orthodox’ stepchildren in the copyright reform/free culture/remix culture movements.
3 The next best thing, of course, is to relentlessly and continuously “bite the hand that feeds them”: folks like Indiana Gregg, Lily Allen, Buckcherry and Metallica are utterly dependent on the goodwill of their fanbase, and they know that there is absoultey nothing they can do to stop anew paradigm from emerging, but they can drum up easy publicity by playing “poor struggling artist victimized by evil p2p thugs.”
Hell, how do you think Indiana Gregg got the seed-capital for www.kerchoonz.com? (Let’s leave aside the fact that the site offers nothing of any real value — the original mp3.com and Soundclick both allow artists to post their music for others to hear for free, and every two-bit ‘web 2.0′ startup offers social networking functionality).
Absent p2p ‘piracy’, Indiana Gregg would still be languishing in almost complete obscurity. BECAUSE of p2p ‘piracy’, she’s a regular web 2.0 mogul! Yay, Iindiana!
If you can’t BEAT ‘em, but you can’t nerve yourself up to *join* them, the next best thing is to appear to oppose them while copying everything they do.
P2p is not only the fastest and most efficient distribution method so far invented, it’s also the original home-ground of Lessig’s “Rip, Mix & Burn” free-culture movement, AND where remix and mashups really came into their own. The “mainstream” recording industry and it’s assorted lickspittles understand this fact, periodic bloviaton about the evils of ‘piracy’ notwithstanding.
After all, does anybody *really* think Lily Allen is anything but the lastest “flavor of the month?”
If Amy Winehouse’s downward spiral hadn’t been such a steep one, SHE’D probably be their current “piracy victim” …
Just something to think about.
Henry Emrich – p2pnet
[Emrich says he's, "just some guy," sometime musician, wannabe writer, sporadic blogger, and (hopefully) good-natured person. He and his wife live in Pennsylvania with two cats, and, "entirely too many record albums".]
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
September, 2009
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September 18th, 2009 at 11:50 am
ahem. ahem Just so you know, Indiana Gregg had already raised the seed capital from a private investment firm which was co-invested in by Scottish Enterprise Co-investment fund in April 2008 (three months prior to her fight with TPB). So, p2p had nothing to do with the investment into her company. In addition, she has been instrumental in working to find alternative solutions that would actually potentially legalise p2p by finding revenue streams via taxes on ISPs and also petitioning for a ‘radio-type’ license for music on the internet. This would help avoid civil liberties issues and allow for sites to report the music being streamed and downloaded on the internet. She was on the BBC last Sunday talking about it. so, before you go and slag off her not-even-yet-launch co-venture with Kerchoonz. Maybe think about doing something a bit more positive and finding out what these people are actually up to? As far as lily allen goes. She has apparantly only just paid off her advances and now she wants people to buy her album so that she can make a bit of money herself. That’s not such a bad thing is it? To be honest, everything that Indiana had mentioned would happen in the Torrent Freak article actually did happen. TPB sunk. The governments and ISPs started to cut people off. three strikes, and all kinds of nonsense. She was just saying that sites who make money off of other peoples works should also share in the money that passes through their doors. Kerchoonz is basically about paying the artists when people listen from what I understand. I don’t think that Soundclick or mp3.com were trying to help compensate artists by paying them from the advertising revenues were they? What is good is that there is a real motivation to try to make everyone happy. P2p could benefit hugely by a compulsory radio-type liscense for music on the web. The big labels would have to stop asking for big advances that never trickle down to the artists and also they would have to stop suing file-sharers (and we know that the money won from those law-suits never makes it into the artists pockets either.) If ISPs were to be ‘taxed’, it wouldn’t mean that they would necessarily raise the price of broadband because there would be instant competition for who was the cheapest provider anyway. So, at least some artists are speaking out and not simply ‘going with the flow’.
September 18th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
@ omg:
Yeah, yeah, yeah…
So many “interested parties” want taxes, levies, and license fees on everything: Internet service, downloading sites, blank media, music samples, appliance POS, broadcasters, singing in the shower, yada, yada, yada. All just to try to bail out an obviously defeated business model, and keep the rights holders of “Happy Birthday” in gas money.
Anyone who thinks tacking on any fees on any of this stuff is a solution to anything is seriously not thinking. You let one group get their tax, countless others will demand their share as well. None of them care if the result becomes too expensive for the average internet user, as long as they get their money (and there’s still no insurances that they actually will).
And, if Indiana Gregg was actually “working to find alternative solutions that would potentially legalise P2P”, then her attack on P2P would have been totally inexplicable. The statement is bullshit.
September 18th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
yada yada yada. I don’t think any of the rights holders are necessarily worried about happy birthday. Doesn’t Warners publishing own that one anyway? and your statement about trying to keep rights holders in gas money is just as extreme as saying all file-sharers want to put musicians and artists on the streets busking and not having time to tour because they will need a ‘day job’.
There needs to be a compromise. Anyway mate, I don’t think that putting a levy on ISPs or telecoms is going to affect their margins. They know that they are the ‘gateways to media’ these days. I mean, do you really think that a blanket license would make internet ‘unaffordable’? Of course not. At the rate that telecom companies and broadband is expanding throughout the world, generating an extra euro per user per month would be next to nothing. What it would do is generate money and solve the p2p versus the ‘musician’s as buskers’ debate. If you don’t think that ISPs and telecoms have broad margins, you’re fooling yourself. Also, I don’t think that Indiana Gregg ever ‘attacked’ P2p. All she did was ask for links to be removed from the trackers and then, she wrote a blog about file-sharing which torrent freak I think published. In her blog, all she was saying is that ‘the internet police’ were on their way. Sure enough, unbeknownst to the rest of us, the ‘internet police’ did start to attack. I remember, it was something like a week after her blog that there was a 3 strikes rule introduced in Canada, then, the ISPs started sending out letters. She said that if TPB didn’t change their model that they would be sunk. I just went and found her original text. Although she did say that file sharing is like stealing unless the creators get compensated, she didn’t ever say she was attacking piracy did she now? The way I read it, she was making some predictions that people didn’t want to hear at the time. And strangely enough, she was right. And it was coming from a rather unassuming independent artist. Also, strangely enough, the RIAA is trying very hard to do exactly what she predicted in her rant.
She wrote
quote:” you’d be silly to think that the Internet police are not planning on coming. How easy would it be to simply find all these people who are illegally ’sharing’ and slap a lawsuit on them. They can do that with a virtual push of a button. How hard do you think it will be for the ISP’s to hand over your Internet passport over to the new frontier police? They can see how much you’ve ’shared’ and potentially fine every single torrent user. I bet the torrent sites wouldn’t like that very much. Suddenly all their users would disappear.” (unquote)
I’m sure she was clearly aware of the civil liberties issues that this would bring on and she said she didn’t think it would be fair, but, that’s just what she thought would end up happening.
Now, a year later, this is exactly what is being pushed to Mandelson and look at Zarkozy too? Then she wrote some blog about governments and how they can make money off of it all. Ahem, isn’t that what they are attempting to do now? Now, it sounds like she is lobbying for a blanket that would essentially turn illegal into legal and if it passed, the whole debate would be over. i’ve heard her on the radio. She wasn’t attacking p2p, she was attacking sites that leech off of other people’s works and pocket the money. Sorry mate, but, I think it’s nice to have p2p and it would be good if it stays, but, I don’t think that it’s fair to put musician’s out on the streets either.
September 18th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
The bit that stood out for me in that BBC interview was when the question was asked “So how do up and coming musicians make a living if fans can listen to all their material for free?” There was some mumbling about making money from gigs (which, for unsigned bands means making about £200 between a few of you every week if you’re lucky – enough for a mini-shop at Spar, I grant you) but generally there was a long pause whilst everyone searched for an answer.
It’s very easy to immediately jump onto the civil rights bandwagon and declare that everyone should be able to listen to anything they want for free. However, if someone can sensibly look at the other side for a moment and tell me a valid way that musicians can spend time trying to develop their career, promote themselves and continue paying for a house, kids and all the usual bills, I’ll join you.
September 18th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I see the Indiana Gregg apologist is out in force once again. Good job on the Wikipedia article by the way. You successfully suppressed Indiana’s making a fool of her self.
You wrote:
“In her blog, all she was saying is that ‘the internet police’ were on their way.”
Yes, it’s been a while since that article was written. Let’s see how accurate she was:
She wrote:
“Is the Internet really that much ‘bigger’ than the ‘real’ world? I think not. I believe that in the near future, we will all be using our Internet passports. If the government can do it in the real world, what’s stopping them from monitoring this new ‘Wild West’ phenomenon of the Internet in every town, city, state and country. I mean … Don’t we have just as much right as citizens to be protected on the Internet as we would be anywhere else? And really, the only people who would disagree with this idea are people who either are engaging in illegal activity or people who claim ‘civil liberty and freedom of speech’ on the Internet, but remember guys, those freedoms are only good until you begin to harm other people.”
Hmmm, I don’t have an “Internet passport”, I don’t know anyone who does, and I wouldn’t know where to get one if I wanted one. As far as I’ve seen, the internet is no more monitored now than it was then.
“So, you’d be silly to think that the Internet police are not planning on coming. How easy would it be to simply find all these people who are illegally ’sharing’ and slap a lawsuit on them. They can do that with a virtual push of a button. How hard do you think it will be for the ISP’s to hand over your Internet passport over to the new frontier police? They can see how much you’ve ’shared’ and potentially fine every single torrent user. I bet the torrent sites wouldn’t like that very much. Suddenly all their users would disappear.”
Hasn’t happened. The amount of information being turned over to the “rights holders” has not to my knowledge increased substantially, and it’s a long way from a couple folks here and there to “all these people who are illegally ’sharing’”.
“So far, there have only been a few ‘examples’ made with users being slapped heavy fines. I have a hunch that this will CHANGE.”
With most people, I would tell them to follow their hunches. However, Indiana should do the exact opposite! Paraphrasing David Spade, “How could she have survived this long with instincts this bad?”
“Hmmm … … … ..well, I assume that the torrent sites are planning to be adaptable pretty soon then, considering the number of pending lawsuits from pretty strong and intelligent companies who have not only proven their adaptability to change, but have changed the world as we know it (companies like Microsoft, for example).”
As far as I know, Microsoft has not sued any torrent site.
“Please – spare us this kind of rhetoric guys. With the likes of Microsoft, Prince, and the IFPI going after you, any outsider might begin to wonder when YOU plan to adapt to ‘change’.”
Yeah, whatever happened with that whole Prince thing? Is he still suing babies by the way?
“It’s becoming evident that your business model is a sinking ship. Pretty soon, your users will be slapped with fines and
more big companies will be slapping on lawsuits. Why not just sink your ship yourselves..eh?”
Finally, she gets something right. The Pirate Bay does seem to have sunk its self, though not because of any lawsuit.
So, in short, Indiana Gregg is still as wrong and irrelevant as she ever was.
September 18th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
come on, she wasn’t talking about a real ‘passport’, it’s a piss take that you know well and clear she’s talking about your access points and IP addresses, duh. And yes, the suits were filed. TPB was ’sunk’. Governments have started to seriously get involved and now the whole thing is only getting worse. p2p should have been lobbying for something fair and finding a few solutions. The civil liberty thing is exactly what she was worried about. Now, it’s happening!
September 18th, 2009 at 3:51 pm
The Gregg apologist wrote:
“The bit that stood out for me in that BBC interview was when the question was asked ‘So how do up and coming musicians make a living if fans can listen to all their material for free?’ There was some mumbling about making money from gigs (which, for unsigned bands means making about £200 between a few of you every week if you’re lucky – enough for a mini-shop at Spar, I grant you) but generally there was a long pause whilst everyone searched for an answer.”
You’re right. Because everyone knows that “unsigned bands” are all making a living from CD sales. This is because people are always willing to fork over $10-$15 to buy a CD with a bunch of songs on it from a band they’ve never heard of. It’s just human nature.
September 18th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
The Gregg Apologist wrote:
TPB was sunk? Last I saw, they were still serving up torrent files. Though I will grant you they do seem to be on the way down. However, it’s debatable whether or not this was due to lawsuits, or just them plain selling out.
Ok, let’s try your wording:
“Is the Internet really that much ‘bigger’ than the ‘real’ world? I think not. I believe that in the near future, we will all be using our IP addresses and access points. If the government can do it in the real world, what’s stopping them from monitoring this new ‘Wild West’ phenomenon of the Internet in every town, city, state and country. I mean … Don’t we have just as much right as citizens to be protected on the Internet as we would be anywhere else?”
See, it still doesn’t work. We have been using IP addresses since the Internet began, and access points for nearly a decade. There’s nothing new about either of them.
September 18th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
omg. are you serious? of course we have been using IP since the internet began. It’s just now that it’s seriously being considered by the GOVERNMENTS to use our IPs against us and not just for things like child pornography, etc. Look, if you don’t believe me, at least believe the pirate party for christ’s sake! This is what the whole pirate party is talking about duh, double duh. hellooooooooo Sorry mate, but, the scenario you quoted was based upon a theoretical ‘wild west’. If you re-read it with IPs & access points in that quote, it actually DOES make serious sense.
September 18th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
We’ll have to agree to disagree about it making sense.
However, the fact remains that when she wrote that, some governments were already making threatening noises, so nothing has really changed there. Also, with the exception of a couple countries, the Internet is still as unregulated and free as it ever was.
Indiana used phrases like, “we will all”, and “find all these people who are illegally
’sharing’”. The war against sharing has failed to directly impact even 1% of those who share, to say nothing of “all” of them. Even where governments have “cracked down” on file sharing, we have yet to see any major reduction in file sharing.
September 18th, 2009 at 7:53 pm
waaaaaaaaa? you’re like talking in some kind of heiroglyphics now. My dearest “Aaron Says’. where are these phrases? of ‘we will all’?? Have you listened to what is being put forward? Mate, you’ve completely lost the plot. Soz, but, I have to laugh here. lol. laughing now. where have you been? The funny thing is, that girl hadn’t been cracking down on any of our file-sharers. She’s like openin’ up the free and working on gettin’ it all legal so there won’t being any hate debates no longer mate. What are you on about? There’s no war on file sharing except for with the governments. That’s cause they can make some money and gain from it all. see, you’re just piping in cause you never read anything. You’re just talking out your tail bone. You sound like a muppet.
September 18th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Since I was (thankfully) AFK for most of today, I managed to miss this particular shitstorm.
A few observations:
1. What the HELL is up with all the Indiana Gregg apologists? I use the woman as as example of someone who springboarded her “career” (such as it is) by slagging p2p ‘piracy’ — while conveniently misunderstanding the issues SURROUNDING such ‘piracy’. You’ve all proven my point, thanks very much.
2. “Mine’s a Gin” (I’ve never gotten drunk enough not to know which one was mine, but we’ll leave that alone.)
Do us all a favor, and just admit that your an industry apologist. The major labels have been fucking their talent-base (both ‘celebrities’ and especially session musicians) for decades, so it’s way past time to pull your head out of Mitch Bainwol’s ass, and stop buying into the RIAA propaganda.
Read up on it, and you’ll quickly realize that the poor beleaguered artists are getting screwed FAR worse by the industry itself, than by ‘piracy’. And yes, this IS a ‘civil rights’ issue, in that a bloated monopoly privilege (copyright) supposedly trumps anything and everything else. Or haven’t you been paying attention?
(Too much gin, methinks.)
Thank you both for confirming my suspicions that Indiana Gregg exists merely to pander to the ignorant and misinformed of the ‘artistic’ populace.
Any possible notions of ‘compromise’ went out the window the second the industry began buying themselves copyright extensions.
And in case you haven’t been keeping up, by the RIAA member corporation’s own statistics, their “business-model” has a 1% ’success’ rate. That’s right — the all-precious ‘recording industry’ that folks like you are trained to reflexively defend at all costs has a 99 percent failure rate by it’s own admission.
Sorry, but not acceptable.
I do, however, love the way you seem to think whether Indiana Gregg had the startup money before or AFTER the TPB fiasco makes some kind of a difference. If she had it BEFORE, then the whole thing is just that much more obvious of a publicity stunt.
So tell me, Gregg-fans, what exactly does “Kerchoonz” offer?
Unsigned artists have had the opportunity to post their stuff for everybody to find since the original mp3.com (which your precious ‘recording industry’ destroyed, but let’s let that slide.)
“Social networking” functionality is pretty much everywhere, as well. Hell, even Last.FM has some kind of tagging and suchlike.
But wait! Kerchoonz *does* have that whacky gell-speaker thingy! Wow — sanctimonious, ill-informed, RIAA-approved bullshit AND the audio equivalent of the “pocket fisherman”. (No, scratch that — Ron Popeil’s stuff is actually kinda useful sometimes.)
Thanks for confirming the thesis of my article, guys.
Bye now.
September 19th, 2009 at 9:21 am
“You sound like a muppet.”
If all of Gregg’s apologists are as wise and eloquent as you, then I pity the poor woman. Nevertheless, let me try one last time to summarize. (Eternally optimistic: that’s what I am.)
In her blog post, Indiana Gregg predicted gloom and doom for the file sharers. She was wrong. That’s all.
September 19th, 2009 at 10:23 am
lol. I’m a former member of the pirate party mate.
September 19th, 2009 at 10:28 am
It was clear he had nothing as soon as the ad-hominem started.
IT ALWAYS comes to that with industry apologists.
Pretty sure OMG is her publicist.
September 19th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I don’t see anything wrong with p2p if there is a way of compensating the little people who make the stuff everyone is sharing. I’m not saying anything about that. The thing is that mentioning that what Mandelson is doing is a ‘failure’ is a bit like saying that TPB wouldn’t get sunk or face a prison sentence. yada yada and you just don’t have your facts together in this blog that’s all. Also, there isn’t any copyright reform going on yet. That’s last on the big list as far as it looks. Zarkozy and Mandelson are planning to shoot the file-sharers down and take away their internet. That’s the reality isn’t it.
September 19th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Dream on wee laddie.
September 19th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Can’t say I’m a fan of Indiana Gregg or Kerchoonz. She demonized filesharing and dealt a serious blow to free culture.
I don’t think Kerchoonz is going to fix the music industry, and I’m reluctant to visit it if any of the money goes to label executives who continue to harass filesharers and subvert the legal system. But if Kerchoonz figures out a way to pay artists a fair share while keeping music free, I don’t see why we should spend any effort hating it. Likewise, we can all forget about Indiana Gregg, so long as she stops attacking filesharing.
Of course Kerchoonz is not the real solution. The problem with the music industry is the music industry. Nothing will change until record labels go away.
September 20th, 2009 at 12:00 am
“She demonized file sharing and dealt a serious blow to free culture”.
You actually consider her half-literate jabbering to constitute a “serious blow?”
Truth be told, Indiana Gregg would be completely inconsequential except for the fact that the corporate-owned media can’t wrap their minds around the fact that even if file-sharing and p2p would somehow magically go away (which they won’t, attempts at draconian bullshit notwithstanding), the corporate media would NEVER regain it’s former status and power.
So they resort propping up cretins like Indiana Gregg, and bankrolling useless nonsense like Kerchoonz.
“I was a former member of the pirate party mate”.
Easy to claim, completely impossible to prove.
Speaking for myself, I find it really hard to believe that somebody informed enough about these issues to actually bother ‘joining’ the Pirate Party would have expended even THIS much effort cheerleading for Indiana Gregg and Kerchoonz.
Think about this: If Indiana Gregg REALLY DID understand about p2p, how the major labels have fucked with copyright law for decades, or even the blindingly obvious fact that artists — ESPECIALLY those who aren’t owned by a major label — need to get their stuff out there (even if, god forbid, somebody manages to hear it ‘for free’).
It’s exceedingly doubtful that she OR Lily Allen stop to think about how expensive a major-label managed publicity campaign really is. (But somehow, Lily Allen feels entitled to complain about how far in debt she is to the label, etc.)
I don’t buy it. Indiana Gregg is nothing but a deliberately-ignorant pawn of the corporate music industry, as is Lily Allen.
But to consider Indiana’s little hissy fit/publicity stunt a “serious blow to free culture” is a hell of a stretch.
(Then again, I’m not really surprised — it’s gotta be difficult being articulating her ‘anti-piracy’ message while sucking so much corporate cock.
September 20th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
” “I was a former member of the pirate party mate”.
Easy to claim, completely impossible to prove. ”
Heh, I don’t even bother to be that articulate with people like that
anymore, Henry.
I just tell them I’m Batman.
Gets the point across and underscores the absurdity of it at the same time.
September 20th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
PS ..
I am, in fact, Batman.
seriously.
cape and all
September 21st, 2009 at 5:38 am
Nice post Henry. Thumbs up for that.
And for OMG — Have you recently read how much shit has been stirred by Sarkozy with his 3-strikes law? Oh and IP addresses can be spoofed. If someone can steal your identity they can steal your IP
September 21st, 2009 at 7:49 am
Just 2 questions:
1. Who the hell is Indiana Gregg?
2. Who the hell is Lily Allen?
Can’t be anyone special as I’ve never heard of either of them.
Put in context, I’ll just assume they’re the RIAA’s newest wannabes and avoid them like a plague.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:34 pm
@Dude from Finland. The problem is that you have big huge corporations aligning themselves with government. The whole point is that your IP can be spoofed and there needs to be another way other than people getting f**king cut off.
Spotify is partly owned by the big record labels. You can look up who owns a company on-line anyway. You can see who the shareholder’s are. It was reported by IDG anyway. You are all missing the point here. It’s not about copyright anymore, it’s about government finding excuses to get into your HD. Got it?
Kerchoonz is not some kind of anti piracy website. It just a site formed by musicians who are complete independents that pays the artists directly from the advertising and it’s a start-up from what I have seen so I don’t see how @henry thinks it’s some kind of demonising thing.
By the way, I didn’t post that I was from the pirate party. some idiot hijacked my nick name. I’m the real Batman anyway.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Actually, boys and girls, Lilly Allens article was on Myspace. Which of course is a Rupert Murdoch tool for dissemination of Murdochisms.
I don’t actually believe Lilly penned the blog article herself – I’d say it was written by a Journo and paid for Rupert.
Although – listening to the words of some of her songs – I do believe her entire act has elements of an IPFI shill exercise.
Lilly my girl…. loved your It’s not fair…. – but let me whisper in those lovely ears of yours…. you put your sixpence on the wrong horse in this race. Sing, by all means, but leave the politics to those that are loosing their empires. You really don’t want to be cast in with that lot do you ? Remember your school days – losers hang out with losers.
It may well be that the Powers that be have now started a campaign to re-educate the new internet users. They’ve started in New Zealand in a big way…… http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/riaa-asks-schoolkids-assist-propaganda