‘Poor defenseless Lily Allen’
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- The recent dust-up involving Lily Allen, FAC (Featured Artists Coalition), and, basically, the entire rest of the online — and P2P — using world, brings up a few interesting issues I don’t think are being discussed very often:
FAC MEMBERS ARE NOT P2P-FRIENDLY
True, they often TALK like they’re P2P-friendly (all their blather about p2p as an important ‘promotion tool’ etc), but they showed their true colors with their statement ’supporting’ Lily Allen and advocating throttling as a punitive measure against p2p users.
Their position may be less evil than that expressed by the RIAA, BREIN, BPI, or IFPI, but the mere fact they advocate any kind of ‘punishment’ for noncommercial file-sharing indicates, at the very least, severely mixed feelings in regard to filesharing itself, and more broadly, at least implicit agreement with the RIAA -member- corporations’ view of copyright.
LILY ALLEN IS A PAWN
Despite her self-proclaimed ‘indie’ status, Lily Allen is every bit as much of a corporate product as Milli Vanilli.
(Yes, I KNOW I mention Milli Vanilli quite a lot — deal with it! 
)
In fact, I’ll go out on a limb here and say Lily Allen represents a ‘new’ approach for the major-label (corporate) music industry.
She isn’t simply a sock-puppet for her corporate paymasters, and the clearest indication of this is the fact the infamous ‘mixtapes’ were still around to be discovered. If she had ‘handlers’, you’d think they’d have checked around for any such P2P-related indiscretions before making her sad little anti-P2P tantrum public.
This may sound paranoid, but both she and FAC very likely represent the next evolution in how the (obsolete and rightfully dead) corporate music ‘industry’ deals with the P2P crisis:
They know even with their cronies in various governments, they can’t make file-sharing ‘go away’. They also know DRM doesn’t — and can’t — work on any meaningful scale (ONE broken copy is all it takes, after all).
They’ve also seen how people reacted to their previous anti-p2p measures.
The post-Napster era of exponentially-exploding numbers of P2P apps with a myriad of different architectures, the proliferation of VPNs and other ‘anonymizing’-type technologies, Electronic civil disobedience actions like Grey Tuesday, the Free Culture and copyright-reform movements, and the various Pirate Parties emerging in many nations can all be traced in one way or another, directly back to the RIAA member corporations’ post-Napster antics.
So if they’re smart, they know they can’t really do much against P2P even if they wanted to, and at least some of them have realized that P2P actually helps them (as many studies have already demonstrated.)
And that’s where the ‘new’ tactic comes in:
1. Corporate lobbyists (example, the RIAA) are overtly P2P-hostile.
2. FAC pretends to be P2P-friendly and ‘progressive’ on the issue.
3. The Patsy (Lily Allen) puts up an incredibly inept and poorly-reasoned anti-P2P argument, resulting in an entirely predictable backlash.
4. In response to the ‘attacks’ against poor defenseless Lily Allen, the ‘P2P-friendly’ FAC rally to her defense just in time to unveil what amounts to an extremely watered-down and pretty much useless ‘reform’ of the status quo which will do absolutely NOTHING to stop P2P ‘piracy’ OR the corporate megalith’s shakedown games, but which allows the PFAC to appear to be ‘progressive’ and ‘fan-friendly” (rather than the rapaciously greedy corporate pawns they all really are.)
Nothing really changes, but everybody ‘wins’:
- P2P advocates ‘win’ (in that they continue to do what they’d continue to do anyway).
- The corporate media conglomerates win DOUBLE because they continue to benefit from the free publicity/promotion of P2P ‘piracy’ and also continue with the lawsuits and ’settlement’ schemes which have become their real business-model post-Napster
The FAC ‘win’, because they get to obey their corporate paymasters without looking like total corporate tools (as opposed to, say, Metallica.) - The Government wins, because now they have yet another pointless moral panic for them to ‘fight’ — lots of busy-work, without the potential downside of ever getting DONE. (They learned THIS lesson from the Cold War, and the U.S. “Global war on Terror”.)
But most of all, Lily Allen wins because she gets to throw a worldwide tantrum, play martyr, and boost her career, and possibly avoid the fate of, say, MC Hammer.
Henry Emrich p2pnet
[Emrich says he's, "just some guy," sometime musician, wannabe writer, sporadic blotter, 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 30th, 2009 at 10:19 am
I think this is wrong… What has actually happened here is that the music industries have effectively managed to muscle in and are almost certain to have the law changed. The law should NEVER be at the discretion of corporations – however by having the FAC puppets have this meeting where THEY agreed, the unsuspecting public is breathing a sigh of relief without seeing the bigger picture – in that the music industry is gaining itself more power – the public once again comes out of this worst!
September 30th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Lily has stated that file-sharing is killing the music industry. GOOD! Let it put these companies out of business. Let the artists represent themselves online and offer their own music for pay that way. the artist would make more money, the music wouldn’t be so dreadfully overpriced, and it would stop us frm having to put up with talentless acts like all of these boy and girl groups that are just random individuals thrown together so the record company can bilk more money out of people. Let us get to the point where music artists are just that – ARTIST’s. Not some dumb buck-toothed girl from Disney that cannot rightfully hold a note without first running after it…jumping on it…and then sitting on it’s chest and holding it’s arms as it fights back.
September 30th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Rabbit:
“I think this is wrong”.
Of course it’s wrong, which is why I wrote the article. People need to understand that the FAC is nothing but another corporate front-group, and it’s whole purpose is to get a “watered-down” put through. If they REALLY ‘got it’ in regard to p2p/copyright etc, they’d be lobbying for drastically shorter copyright terms, or protection of noncommercial file-sharing or etc., but they’re not.
What they ARE doing is throwing their support behind the corporate music industry’s latest anti-p2p spokesdrone, and advocating the slightly ‘better’ option of throtting as opposed to full-out disconnection.
What’s sad, is that people are actually taking them seriously. Over on Torrentfreak I remember seeing how people were “encouraged’ by their supposedly pro-p2p rhetoric (about how it’s a promotion tool etc.) My immediate question was how folks who think it’s a valuable promotion tool would want to penalize people for using it.
Somebody needs to call bullshit on that.
Doug:
Agreed 100%
September 30th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
“People need to understand that the FAC is nothing but another corporate front-group, and itâs whole purpose is to get a âwatered-downâ put through.”
Thats what I was trying to describe, but for some reason went on a bit… For some reason your article didn’t seem to come across as clear as that to me either! Maybe write another article with that line as a headline?
The trouble is that the mainstream press has fallen for it, and the public at large are being horribly mislead as a result.
September 30th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
“Thats what I was trying to describe, but for some reason went on a bit⦠For some reason your article didnât seem to come across as clear as that to me either! Maybe write another article with that line as a headline?”
I have absolutely no control over what gets used as “headline” for the stuff I submit. That’s Jon Newton (the guy who actually runs the site.)
I’m just a (fairly) frequent contributor. To be honest, I used to be on the “other side” of this stuff. A lot of my earliest interaction with p2pnet was to basically come around, post inflamatory “troll” type of stuff accusing p2p users of just not wanting to pay for stuff, etc. Typical,grade-A, RIAA-style bullshit.
But then somebody (I forget exactly who) dared me to read Lawrence Lessig’s book “Free culture”. Well, one thing led to another, and now here I am. For some reason I still haven’t quite figured out, Jon hasn’t quite figured out how much of a complete prick I actually am, so he keeps publishing the stuff I submit.
I’ve been in a music group for twenty years now, but I don’t bring the other guys into *my* p2p advocacy or copyright reform advocacy or whatever, because I can’t speak for anybody else. It takes time for people to “come around”, and they have to do it on their own.
I’ve been working on some solo projects for year — lost three albums worth of stuff when mp3.com got destroyed, and turned into the piece of crap it is now. I guess I should have realized what was up back then, but it took up until sometime in 2006 for me to really start changing my viewpoint on this stuff.
Sorry to ramble — I tend to do that too, as you can see.
October 1st, 2009 at 2:14 am
*sigh*
R.I.P. Lilly Allen’s Career.
Even after this drama, apparently she is in the lineup for the Big day Out 2010 festival here in Aus lol > http://bigdayout.com & http://tinyurl.com/y9rc2jq
October 1st, 2009 at 4:31 am
you cant keep saying …i ramble…just stop it……
October 1st, 2009 at 4:56 am
just a thought….re lily allen and milli vanilli…its abit like saying a radish is the same as a spring onion…on the grounds that they both come from the earth and are both vegetables…..if mr vanilli had launched himself on myspace you can bet your bottom dollar nobody would have heard of him….lily on the other hand……………
October 1st, 2009 at 10:49 pm
“…mr vanilli…”
LOL