Music stars at war over file-sharing

[']['affy]

Pop stars including Lily Allen, Gary Barlow and James Blunt have declared war on illegal file-sharing - and on another group of big-name musicians in the process.
Their number one enemies are the people who download music without paying for it.
Forty billion music files were downloaded without payment in 2008, global music industry body the IFPI said, meaning 95% of all digital music was downloaded illegally.
Worldwide album sales have halved in the 10 years since the original mass file-sharing software, Napster, appeared.
The peer-to-peer debate has been rumbling on for a tedious, divisive and largely fruitless decade, with illegal traffic continuing to grow as lawsuits, education campaigns and anti-piracy technologies have come and gone.

looks like mixed feelings over file sharing

can get full story here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8267142.stm

[DaBees-Knees]

Regardless of the pros and cons of the argument, it's the numbers that intrigue me. So now they are saying it's 40 billion pirated downloads in a year (note that there's no indication of how they came up with that number). I would be very interested to see how they came up with that figure. If the same guy that came up with 40 billion could also count the number of copyright free downloads that took place over the same period, using the same formula to do the counting, that would be a figure that's really worth seeing.

[GhostShip]

I think its time for me to dish the dirt on the current poster child for this campaign and then you can all decide the true state of affairs in regards to why these people may be whining about being ripped off by their own labels and blaming filesharers for their own poor business sense.

http://fametastic.co.uk/archive/20090107/14953/lily-allen-defends-cocaine-i-know-lots-of-people-who-take-it-and-are-fine/

http://fametastic.co.uk/archive/20060710/1799/lily-allen-admits-teenage-years-are-a-blur-of-drink-and-drugs/

So is the story here really this one:  talent lacking young lady needs more money for drugs ?

This lady also makes a lot of claims about coming from a council estate but yet went to the same stage school as amy winehouse and other famous folks, some of those celebrities have serious drug issues too, no surprises their eh folks, and to top off the ignorance Lilly (should that be Silly ?) also urged parents to allow their children to experiment with ecstacy

http://www.newsoftheworld.co.uk/news/article177212.ece

What more need be said.

[Update] It seems Mr Blunt is not too far away from the sex and drugs scene either according to this news report

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/sunday-telegraph/i-bedded-james-blunt-then-he-dumped-me/story-e6frewt0-1111117853900

Costello has described how the singer partied for two days straight with a constant supply of drugs.
"There were so many drugs. There was this massive silver platter of drugs, every drug you could think of: cocaine, MDMA, K (ketamine, a tranquilliser used on horses), hash,'' she said.
"Everyone was taking drugs. I have never been with him and him be straight.
"He would go to sleep smashed and wake up and have a few hours before he got smashed again.''

How pathetic, and these are the people who call filesharers theives and demand overbroad legislation, I wouldnt trust any of them to babysit for me is all I can say.