It seems like Lily Allen is always complaining about something, and her most recent tirade is about illegal downloading and copyright infringement. This would be a plausible argument if it wasn’t for the fact that she’s a total hypocrite. According to TorrentFreak, Lily had two free mix tapes on her website that were not authorized by the artists; she never got permission to use the songs, let alone give them away for free.

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The fight over music piracy has become increasingly brutal in recent months, with heated debate turning to outright culture-clash. A large segment of the population would readily agree that pirated music is stolen music, because that’s what they’ve read in the newspapers. Arguably, many of these law-abiding citizens don’t  own (or often use) a computer, much less a digital copy of a song. Yet they make claims and argue points just as the RIAA’s lawyers do in court, daily. Here are eight rebuttals to such arguments.

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The European Parliament elections were held yesterday, June 7, and the Swedish Pirate Party, with 7 percent of the vote, is guaranteed at least one seat in EU Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. The Pirate Party is the largest party in the 18-30 age range of voters, and is the fifth largest party in Sweden.

The Pirate Party has the potential to gain yet another seat when the final counting, which will include around a million postal votes, will be done later next week. The Party aims to reform copyright and patent law, and also defends Internet privacy and the freedom of sharing information.

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The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) says that global sales in 2008 decreased 8.3 percent  to $18.4 billion in 2008. That number takes in account all forms of revenue: physical sales, digital sales and performance rights. The recording industry blames piracy, and most likely there is some truth to that assumption. However, I think it’s also necessary to judge the value of digital content, and decide how much music fans are willing to pay for music that can be copied instantaneously at zero cost, and erased just as quickly.

How many times have you deleted or simply lost digital music in the past decade? Now compare that to the number of physical records you’ve lost or damaged in the same period of time. You probably still have CDs that you bought in the 90s, while your entire digital collection has been renewed several times. So, even though music can theoretically survive longer in digital format, people give less importance to “0s” and “1s” than original vinyl or CDs. The abundance and availability of digital music gives it more ephemeral characteristics, and makes it less valuable to the consumer.

Bandcamp, which allows musicians to set their own prices for songs sold on the site, recently gave the option to set prices as low as 10 cents per track.

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In a hearing on Monday with music and movie industry executives in Los Angeles, Representative Howard Berman discussed how badly file sharing is affecting the economy as a whole, and planned to work more closely with other governments to fight international piracy.

To justify the push for stricter enforcement, Berman cited statistics from the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He also said that the music industry estimates more than 40 billion illegal downloads in 2008. All of the numbers read the same: millions of dollars lost, and Americans losing their jobs as a result. Can this be true?

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Coda.fm is the newest torrent search engine site that separates itself from the pack. By hosting only music related torrents, and offering the option to actually buy the album of what you’re downloading, the site is looking to revamp the common notion that torrents are the internet’s dark secret, hidden in the depths of questionable advertising and members-only access.

On every torrent page, Coda.fm provides a link for you to purchase the album on Amazon. This may seem ridiculous at first, for why would somebody buy an album they are downloading? In fact, the feature was requested by users in the Feedback section of the site, and recent research shows that, contrary to traditional beliefs, file sharers truly buy music.

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