OPINION
8
Lily Allen Rode Piracy to Fame, But Now It's Not OK?
Singer ripped others' music for own mixes before she was a star
By W. McCahill
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Posted Sep 23, 09 10:13 PM CDT
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(Newser)
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Singer Lily Allen has caused a stir with recent rants against music piracy (and a blog where she posts opinions from like-minded creative pals), but when she was trying to make it, she was guilty of just that offense. Allen included tracks from Jay-Z, Jefferson Airplane and others on mixtapes (still available, by the way) with her own songs, Michael Masnick notes in a Techdirt post "from the put-the-stone-down-lily,-that's-a-big-glass-house dept."
“If you’re downloading all your music for free, some real music fan somewhere is paying for your music,” Allen wrote today. “Unfortunately there aren’t enough people paying, which is threatening new music.” A pot-kettle situation indeed, Masnick says, particularly given how the industry has gone after so-called pirates. And, he wonders, “How could someone who is still directly distributing free music from others from her own major-label site claim a moral high ground against music being free?”