Pop mega-star Prince continued his knight-errant battle against on-line music piracy by suing fans trading recordings and bootlegged musical performances through Blogger and Facebook. Citing the Federal copyright law and other anti-piracy statutes, Plaintiff “Prince Rogers Nelson” brought action in the Northern District of California against two named defendants, Dan Chodera, and Karina Jindrova, and 20 John Does operating on-line under aliases such as “Purple Kiss Two” and “World of Bootleg,” alleging that “each defendant is responsible for up to thousands of acts of infringement and bootlegging” and that “in just one of the many takedown notices sent to Google with respect to Doe 2 (aka DaBang319), Prince identified 363 separate infringing links to file sharing services, with each link often containing copies of bootlegged performances of multiple separate musical compositions.”
The complaint specifies numerous audio and video files offered for download or exchange through email addresses by the defendants, including live performances from North Carolina in 2011, Mohecan Sun Casino in 2003, Oakland in 2002 and Chicago in 1983 in Chicago. Prince seeks 1,000,000 USD damages from each defendant, a total of 22,000,000 USD overall..
Prince has engaged in a long and protracted battle with music prates and traders, often suing anyone who distributes his music without permission. His 2007 lawsuit against the Pirate Bay was withdrawn shortly after being filed.
Legal Director of Google Fred von Lohmann, widely regard as the smartest Internet lawyer in the world and former lead attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, declined public comment, (since Blogger is a Google property), but noted that it would be interesting to see if any of the defendants appeared in defense of the case.
Prominent music attorney Gabin Rubin of the Artists Rights Enforcement Corp, perhaps the world’s leading firm for artists’ royalty recovery, believes Prince within his rights. “He has a right to sue…this is to scare current infringers and discourage future ones.”
Still, music fans are appalled and public backlash has been hostile.
“I’ll never give Prince another dime of my money,” railed one former fan, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Prince’s suit comes at a time when on-line video piracy is increasing exponentially. Sites like Ustream have become hotbeds for public distribution of rock concerts as fans live-stream video of the concert through their mobile phones. Prince avoids this problem by forbidding mobile phones from being brought into his live performances.
