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And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week
CMU Beef Of The Week #192: Prince v The Internet
By Andy Malt | Published on Friday 31 January 2014
Prince has a beef. And that beef is with The Internet. No, not the Odd Future offshoot, the actual internet. All of it. Except his own website, I guess. Though you never know.
The artist currently known as Prince’s long running battle against those who would upload his music without asking him first is long and well documented. It all began in 2007, when the musician issued a takedown notice to YouTube, asking for a video of a baby dancing to his song ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ to be removed from the site. Which YouTube did. But the mother of the baby, Stephanie Lenz, then issued a counter claim to YouTube and got the video reposted. It now has over 1.25 million views, despite being really rubbish.
Not content with that, Lenz then sued Universal (which had actually issued the takedown) with the backing of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying that the music in the 29 second clip was covered by US fair use doctrine. Amazingly, through a series of rulings and appeals, this case is yet to reach a conclusion, with appeals from both sides currently awaiting a hearing in the Ninth Circuit appeals court.
What can we learn from this case? Well, arguably it has cost everyone involved far more in legal fees than any sum Prince has lost from having that video online. Plus that clip has now been watched over 1.25 million times more than you might have expected it to be. So from Prince’s side, a bit of a backfire.
Nonetheless, Prince’s crusade against the internet continues. And in 2010 he declared himself the winner, telling The Mirror: “The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you”.
He seemingly backtracked on that theory last year though, when he made a new video available for sale via his own website. Only via his own website mind, and only for money. Much to the distaste of many of his fans, who would have rather watched it on YouTube for nothing. And maybe put it into a playlist with that baby video too.
Shortly after that, Prince had another shot at taking down some short, barely audible videos. And more successfully this time, getting a whole load of six second Vine vids filmed at his SXSW performance last March taken offline. And this time no one even sued him for the takedowns, which is probably good news, as he’d had to fork out $4 million for failing to help promote some perfume just a year earlier. I’m sure he would have done all that promo work, had he not been distracted by all that internet.
Anyway, bolstered by that success (possibly), this month Prince went in for the kill. Having discovered that there were people in the world sharing bootlegs of his live performances, earlier this month he sued 22 bloggers making these recordings available. Given that this must have been going on amongst his fans since online music sharing first began, and via bootleg cassettes way before that, you have to wonder what took him so long to act.
Whatever, he filed a lawsuit stating that each of these file-sharing people – identified only by their Blogger usernames – now owed him $1 million each, plus whatever other money might be knocking around. Their sharing of his work, said the lawsuit in an attempt to justify the purple one’s claims for damages and demand for a jury trial, had “caused and will continue to cause substantial, immediate and irreparable injury to Prince for which there is no adequate remedy at law”.
It’s now three and a half years since even the Recording Industry Association Of America realised that this sort of lawsuit, ie directly suing music fans over file-sharing, is not a great course of action – mainly because of all the PR damage it does and the massive losses it leads to as legal costs mount up and damages payments only trickle in, if they come in at all.
And the good news for Prince fans hoping not to be sued, is that he’s seemingly realised this too. Or he got bored. One of those two things. Either way, he has withdrawn his litigation. His lawyer told TMZ yesterday: “Because of the recent pressure, the bootleggers have now taken down the illegal downloads and are no longer engaging in piracy. We recognise the fans craving for as much material as possible, but we’d prefer they get it from us directly than from third parties who are scalpers rather than real fans of our work”.
Prince has reserved the right to re-file the case if he sees fit though. But with all that off the agenda for the time being, at least he can concentrate fully on arranging the cushions on Lianne La Havas’s sofa for maximum comfort at his press conference in her living room next week.
