Sign O’ the Times: Prince to Sue YouTube
In what will surely be the funkiest lawsuit the online world has ever seen, Prince plans to sue YouTube for unauthorized use of his music. The Purple One wants to “reclaim his art on the Internet.”
A statement released on Prince’s behalf argued:
“YouTube … are clearly able (to) filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,”
This is what it sounds like, when Prince sues.
Prince is also going after eBay and The Pirate Bay and has brought on British firm Web Sheriff to coordinate the clean up of his unauthorized materials online. According to Web Sheriff, the company has removed roughly 300 items from eBay and 2,000 videos from YouTube.
Two thousand? Perhaps Prince himself said it best:
“They say two thousand zero zero party over, oops, out of time…”
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[...] aka The Artist Formerly Known As Clueful, has joined the litigious bandwagon ignoring the DMCA and suing YouTube — “to reclaim his art on the Internet.” Riiiight. Apparently, someone [...]
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[...] markedly different approaches. Prince set his sites on YouTube back in September when he announced plans to sue the video-sharing site for not filtering out unauthorized content. Radiohead, on the other hand, [...]
Is Prince a Creep on YouTube? « NewTeeVee
— 10:58 AM on May 30, 2008
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If Prince is so upset about this, why doesn’t he just start suing his fans that are uploading the content instead of the sites that are hosting it. After a couple of lawsuits, people would figure it out and would stop helping to promote his material. It’s easy to try and go after YouTube, but they really aren’t doing anything wrong. If Prince feels that strongly, there is a way to identify these uploaders. It’s not the direction that I think the music industry should head, but it makes more sense then trying to sue an aggregator. What’s next, we sue Yahoo! for letting me search for .mp3 files that are found on the internet? If the studios really think it’s that easy for YouTube to block infringing videos, then they shouldn’t have any trouble setting up some filters and finding the content themselves.
Hi Davis,
Knowing some Prince fans, if his royal badness did sue them, they’d frame the papers they were served. Prince is a pretty famous eccentric, so who really knows what his end game is here.
prince is right when he says they are making money off him. without all the content these sites have (both copyright infringing and not) they would have no traffic and without any traffic they have no ad clicks. youtube has made bank off creators AND content providers (users who upload). and has given them nothing in return. the reason other big companies don’t sue is because they are making insider deals with youtube/google (this is a rumour but it seems true)… Prince on the other hand has always acted independently of these publishers/labels.
Davis makes a really good point. If the music industry is just going to go after the big companies like eBay and Youtube, then it’s clear that they have ulterior motives. I don’t believe that Prince cares about the music, he just wants the attention and money.