14 DAY TRIAL // Prince sure knows how to make himself loved by his fans worldwide. Many stars choose to hold charitable concerts or join in the fight against hunger or poverty and add their image to humanitarian campaigns. Not Prince.
The pop legend just decided that if he's going to do something, he's really going to do it in style and reach out to every particular fan and sue. According to BBC, "Prince is using Web Sheriff to demand that fans remove all and any album covers, images of him in concert and any Prince lyrics from their fan sites. Sites that fail to act on the demands should expect legal action to follow as Prince is claiming breach of copyright."
I know it's not my cup of tea per se but I should think that sites that fans manage are a good thing and might even be seen as free advertisements that boost his fan base and his work and take it all to the next level. "For some fans this sort of one-on-one attention from their idol will be a dream come true, but for the majority of Prince's ever decreasing fan base, being sued for the crime of printing lyrics on a web page, running an image of Prince, or worst still, running an Amazon affiliate ad that includes a Prince album cover won't be welcomed," Duncan Riley of TechCrunch.com adds.
Last week Prince demanded that a video of a baby boy be taken down from YouTube because he was dancing to his 1984 hit "Let's go crazy". Bad move, as the mother of the infant got raging mad and filed a suit asking for damage. It should have been a sort of an early warning for what is yet to come if he decides to go on with the global lawsuit, but it seems the lesson was not learned. And as a spokesperson for Prince Fans United states that "we respect copyright laws always, however about 80% of the images on the websites are not copyright owned by Prince," it looks like it's going to be a thrill to follow this in the months to come.