Comment: Prince suing YouTube, eBay and P2P sites in bonkers digital crusade

14 September 2007 18:15 GMT / By Amy-Mae Elliott

Without having ever given it any major thought, in the back of my mind I always considered Prince to be quite forward thinking in his approach to modern music, but recent news that he's planning to take on the entire interweb has made me release that - and I know I may be late to the party here - it's all been for his, and not the fans benefit.

Why on earth Prince feels he is different from any other artist who has their music posted on YouTube, sold on eBay or shared on peer to peer sites goes a long way towards explaining the type of guy who legally get his named changed to get out of a record contract.

Prince's complaint is legally sound, his media belong to him, no-one else and that YouTube should recognise this and take the whole lot down. After all if they pull undesirable content they should pull his unauthorised content too.

A statement issued on is behalf said: "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."

He has gone as far as to enlist the services of British company "Web Sheriff" who are apparently policing content and removing it as fast as YouTubers can put it up.

I think my benevolent view of Prince stemmed from his then pioneering music subscription service, NPGMusicClub.com as well as his decision to give his albums away with concert tickets sales. Wow, thought I, what a nice souvenir of your time in his live presence. I've since looked into the reasoning behind this and it seems it's all just a ploy to boost album sales figures.

My other Prince-as-friend-of-the-people myth came from him recently giving his Planet Earth album away with The Mail On Sunday. At the time a Mail top bod said: "It's all about giving music for the masses and he believes in spreading the music he produces to as many people as possible", it appears to have been just another way to stick it to his UK record company that he was having issues with.

But having now discovered all this about the Artist Formerly Known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, I think that anyone with a clearly monstrous ego that's the size of his, and such rabid self-interest, is possibly the only individual capable of thinking he could take on suing practically the entire internet and win.

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Comment, Software, Websites, YouTube, Audio, Music downloads, eBay, Prince