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While I have never looked up the meanings of the name "Lily", British singer Lily Allen has pretty much convinced me that it must translate into "train wreck" in at least one language.
Ms. Allen is as well known for her personal antics as she is for her hit songs such as "Smile" and "The Fear". If given an opportunity to open her mouth, she doesn’t hesitate, and what comes out is usually headline fodder for tabloids in a matter of minutes. So what is the best idea in the world for someone who seemingly has no self control? That’s right, give her a blog.
It’s Not Alright — a bit of an allusion to the title of her debut album, Alright, Still — is the name of her new blog, and in her very first post she decides to take on the subject of file sharing and piracy. To get this point across how she feels that piracy is destroying the music industry, she takes on well-known rapper 50 Cent’s recent comments about how he feels it is a part of the marketing machine that is the music industry.
The problem with Ms. Allen’s inaugural blog post is that the entire first section that contains the comments about 50 Cent’s views is a direct copy of a post from TechDirt. Not just a snippet, not just a quote, she copied the entire post and then provided no back link, no credit, no block quoting, there was absolutely no way to tell that this was not her own writing. (Well, beyond the fact it was far more lucid than the second half of the post which were her own words.) I have placed a screen shot below of Ms. Allen’s blog with no changes to it except to add a drawn line: everything above the line is from TechDirt, everything below the line is Ms. Allen’s original content.
You can see Ms. Allen’s original post here, and the original post from TechDirt here. As you can clearly see, she provides no credit or backlink to TechDirt, so she has effectively stolen their content without giving any due credit. Michael Masnick of TechDirt has posted some thoughts on the situation, and we have to say he is taking it like a trooper and very much keeping it tongue-in-cheek.
Perhaps you can chalk it up to it only being Ms. Allen’s first post. Perhaps she forgot to credit, or maybe she doesn’t know the proper etiquette, but you would think that given the subject she is discussing, she could have at least given some form of indication as to where the material came from.
