It’s okay for Lily Allen to pirate but anyone else is scum

There’s a number of great posts today about the whole music piracy nonsense. However none come close to show the hypocrisy of the music business’s so-called war against piracy than the whole Lily Allen crap-fest that has hit the blogosphere today.

It all centers around a post on Allen’s recently launched blog, It’s Not Alright, where she attempts to take rapper 50 Cent to task over his recent interview on CNBC where he suggested that piracy is really just part of the music business. I say attempts because her argument would actually mean something if she hadn’t stolen it – word for word – from a post by Michael Masnick of Techdirt.

Here is a graphic of the post courtesy of Sean P. Aune over at SiliconAngle where he draws a line between the original text written by Masnick (top) and Allen’s rambling nonsense below it.

Masnick responded to the whole thing with a post today and like him I am having a really hard time making any sense of her incoherent reasoning of who she seems to think is affected by piracy. In the paragraph she mentions recording studio people, website builders, designers and last but not least the kids who put up posters.

Excuse me?

Exactly what do any of those people have to do with being affected by piracy. Every single example she uses are people who get paid for their service regardless of whether some musician’s music is pirated or not. Not one of them is paid using the recording companies highly questionable percentage basis as the musicians are. They get cash on the barrelhead – period.

So not only does Allen show that she has absolutely no couth when it comes to other people’s “copyrights” – I guess because it was a blogger they don’t count – but she shows that she doesn’t seem to understand some basic economics of paying for services rendered.

Do yourself a favor Lily Allen – shut up and leave the discussion about music and the bullshit around piracy to those who actually know what they are talking about, not what their manager or record company pumps up their ass.