Lily Allen has been caught in the middle because she tried to state her opinion but got hammered for it. Read about it at The Guardian or The Age.
There has been a lot more said from both sides of the issue. The best wrap up I've read so far is from Cory Doctorow @ Boing Boing:
A law that no one understands and no one abides by is no law at all. Parts of copyright -- the right to regulate how commercial licenses with industrial entities work -- are really important to me and to all working artists. But if we continue to try to expand copyright to cover everything, every interaction that involves a copy (which is every interaction these days), then the broad consensus that copyright is nonsense will continue to grow, and we'll lose the good stuff as well as the ridiculous stuff.
It leads into my not very clear blog post a few days ago about property rights in the 1800s.
My main point was that at the time the only punishment for a crime was death. They eventually moved away from this as people started to see it as unfair, and thus began to lose respect for the law. Judges were beginning to let people off for crimes because they didn't want them sent to death.
The three strikes rule is an attempt to bring in an option other than suing someone for millions of dollars, and for that, it should at least be taken seriously.
Unfortunately many have lost respect for copyright after they've seen it constantly extended, used to suppress information, used as an excuse to try to silence political opinion, and other uses well beyond it's original intention, which was to encourage people to create.
Something needs to be done. The three strikes rule is a ham fisted attempt at a beginning, fixing the symptom (downloading) and not the problem (outdated copyright laws).
I hope it's fixed soon. I'd love to see the copyright landscape cleared up to let all that old information start to flow, with the artists/authors getting paid, instead of rotting in basements, with the artists/authors getting nothing.