Has hired Web Sheriff to go after YouTube, eBay, and The Pirate Bay for allegedly profiting from copyright violations of his work.
All is not well in "3121 land" with rock star Prince, or the artist formerly know as such, launching a multi-pronged legal campaign against YouTube, eBay, and The Pirate Bay for allegedly encouraging copyright violations of his work. Prince has hired UK-based company Web Sheriff, which specializes in policing the internet and going after people responsible for copyright violations, to carry out the campaign.
According to John Giacobbi, president of Web Sheriff, "In the past couple of weeks, we have removed about 2,000 infringing clips from YouTube. We get them down and the next day, there are 100 or 200 more. Their business model is built on making money off other people’s creative work," he continued.
"Their business model is built on making money off other people’s creative work," Giacobbi said. He told Reuters that Web Sheriff has also removed about 300 seemingly benign items bearing Prince’s likeness, such as mugs and keychains, from eBay.
"Very few artists have ever taken this kind of action over their rights," a spokesperson for the artist said. "Yet Prince has shown time and time again he is ready to challenge the system in new ways to put artists and music first."
And Prince says there’s no excuse for these sites not to crack down on the copyright-violating content that inevitably makes its way online through one channel or another.
"YouTube, [eBay and Pirate Bay] 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," the statement from Prince’s rep continued. "Prince strongly believes artists, as the creators and owners of their music, need to reclaim their art."
"Prince has always been independently minded, going back to the row over his own name," Giacobbi also noted.
He continued:
It made him more savvy over protecting his own rights. But now we are very firmly in the digital age so online rights are very important. 99% of content on the internet will be unauthorised. It doesn’t matter if its Prince or David Beckham or Tom Cruise or whoever, every artist under the sun suffers from wholesale abuse on every level. Prince has decided enough is enough.
Maybe so, but he’s definitely not as "savvy" as some think he is because why on earth would he want to target the very sites that get people interested in his work in the first place? Are we only allowed to watch Prince by either paying to see see him perform live in concert or via "authorized" clips on his site? This, in my opinion, would only serve to further isolate a music star who already has a knack for the eccentric(remember the whole symbol name change thing?).
As for eBay, they’re apparently being targeted because they have offered bootleg copies of his material for sale, a suit nobody can question the merits of. But, targeting YouTube and The Pirate Bay is just plain ignorant.
Targeting The Pirate Bay is a losing proposition since they only host non-copyrighted BitTorrent trackers, which is legal under Swedish law. He has reportedly hired a "top Swedish law firm" to carry out his legal battles against the site in that country, but again, unless they plan on somehow changing Swedish law they had better be prepared to lose.
In any case, it’s actually kind of sad to see Prince go off the deep end like this and go after YouTube and the Pirate Bay as though he can somehow turn back the clock and make it the year "1999" all over again. I mean what exactly does he expect to accomplish? If he thinks he can make more money if only The Pirate Bay and YouTube would remove all his material then maybe he should change his name to whatever the symbol for crazy is.
The Pirate Bay’s response so far in a blog posting is keeping with their traditional ambivalence about US-based artists and media conglomerates trying to dictate what people and organizations in other countries can and cannot do.
It reads:
Yesterday we got informed that The artist formerly known as The artist formerly known as Prince is going to sue us. Using web sheriff! Good news, maybe we get some updates for the legal threats page. And good luck Mr Son of a King, you probably just lost a lot of your fans.
So is Prince a "Son of a King," or just a "Son of a #$%@?" I’ll leave it for you to decide.
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I've been interested in P2P since the early, high-flying days of Napster and KaZaA. I believe that analog copyright laws are ill-suited to the digital age, and that art and culture shouldn't be subject to the whims of international entertainment industry conglomerates. Twitter | Google Plus
I know no one by the name of Prince, as far as I'm concerned there is no one to claim copyright infringement. By the way douchebag, I recorded your songs from the radio on tape, then I burned the tape and pissed on the ashes because you suck.
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