Two strikes, Lily

Lily Allen is a vocal proponent of legislation that will enable large media companies to request UK ISPs to terminate the Internet connection of any user they suspect of file sharing illegal content owned by the aforementioned companies. Big Media wants a so-called three strikes policy – users will be warned three times and if they don’t obey they will have their ISP account closed.

There are many things wrong with this policy that you can read about elsewhere but the obvious two are  the complete lack of due legal process and being considered guilty until proven innocent.

Strike One

As mentioned here recently, Ms Allen set up a blog to defend this policy and has been found wanting. She said on her blog – now mysteriously disappeared – that she doesn’t have anything against downloaders but was very against uploaders. Er, aren’t both required to do file sharing, Lily? She peppered her blog with copyright infringing material such as scans of newspaper articles and direct lifts of online reporting, all, it appears, without permission of the copyright owners. Now she has been caught out again.

Strike Two

When someone publishes something online it’s a good bet that they want a wide an audience as possible. The problem for the clueless – such as Ms Allen – is that they also get a large group of what newspapers used to call fact checkers; they don’t seem to exist at newspapers these days but I digress. As reported by Michael Masnick today, Ms Allen is hosting downloadable mixtapes (mix1 and mix2) on her main site at lilyallenmusic.com and it looks like she has just earned her second strike. You’re correct Lily, it’s not alright.