As we mentioned last week, Lily Allen has launched a campaign against the illegal piracy of music, as it damages the music industry, and makes it impossible for new talent to emerge in the UK.
After launching a blog to post the email responses she has received from numerous UK artists, Allen had to take down the blog after only three days because she had received so much “abuse” for speaking her mind on the issue of file-sharing.
A woman getting abuse for speaking her opinions online? Huh. That’s different.
Yesterday Lily Allen attended a meeting/debate with Business Secretary Lord Mandelson and musicians such as Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien at Air Studios in Hampstead, which lasted over three hours.
The BBC reports that:
“The attendees agreed perpetrators should not have their internet accounts suspended, as ministers have suggested.
“Instead, they released a statement saying persistent offenders should have their bandwidths ‘squeezed’.”
On Twitter Allen said that she wouldn’t attend the meeting because it was just going to be a “press frenzy” and that she didn’t want to “detract from the issues”. However, Allen did end up attending the media-free event, and she was reportedly cheered when she entered the room.
O’Brien even went so far to say that Lily was “extremely brave” to attend the meeting,
“She's taken a lot of flak for what she's said. What she's done has been brilliant because she started the process where artists have stood up and said, you know what, there is a consequence to illegal file-sharing.”
At the end of the heated debate, over 100 artists "overwhelmingly voted" to support a plan to send “two warning letters to file-sharers before restricting their broadband speeds.”
A huge high-five to Lily Allen for not only speaking her mind, but for actually acting on what she believes in. Because Lily used the Internet to speak her mind, and to fire up a debate between artists, people started paying enough attention to the debate that the government was forced to take action.
Agree with her or not, Lily shakes things up, and gets things done.
It’s just unfortunate that she had to be subjected to abuse along the way.