All I have to say about this is – Go Prince. US pop star Prince (you know, the most gayish dude you have ever seen, also known as “smbol” and what not) plans to sue internet giant YouTube, eBay and Pirate Bay over illegal music use. Though it is disputable whether Prince’s music is in fact art, this is not the point of this post. Prince is looking to fight and sue over something that is important. And that makes up for crappy music he makes.
On the other hand, though – Prince is rich as fuck… Why the hell does he care about a few lousy videos of his on YouTube? It’s not like he’s going broke and needs some urgent cash to pay for his fag hookers… Take this into account – in the 80s there were tape recorders so people could freely record any song off of the radio or could duplicate a cassette. Did this ability to gain access of pirated music prevent artists like Prince from gathering an enormous wealth?
But that’s not the point either. Fact of a matter is – it’s his own shit, his music, his crap, if he wants it off the net, he should have the right to have it off the web (he’d be stupid to do that, but whatever). I think he’s only looking for publicity with this, but it’s way too premature a statement at this point of time.
Prince has a very valid point… He’s pissed over YouTube, eBay and Pirate Bay (which is considered one of the major player in movie and music pirateship) that they are clearly able to filter porn and child pornography out of their site pretty much instantly, but seem to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content, because this type of content is what made YouTube such a huge business success.
And that makes sense – because if you demonstrate an active involvement in filtering adult related content and child pornography, as is obvious with YouTube, then that means you are able to take actual responsibility for the content that gets uploaded on the sites. If they are able to filter one type of content, why can’t they filter another?
These websites have it worked out. For the most part they use the universal excuse of having no responsibility over user uploaded content as they serve as a mere service provider, not as a monitoring service that is aimed to police the content.
Pirate Bay is fundamentally wrong so the lawsuit against them would make sense. The past however proves that all previous attempts to shut Pirate Bay down failed, due to a simple reason that Swedish government didn’t want to have anything to do with it. As far as YouTube goes – it’s a fantastic platform for startup bands to virally market their music. If it wasn’t for YouTube, we would have not heard from such artists as Sick Puppies (their song All The Same was used as a background music for the original “Free Hugs” video). Music videos on YouTube have been nothing but free advertising for the artists of all calibers. Why would someone want off the site??? Maybe he’s just getting old and cranky. Damn senile men…
As a conclusion I would like to say one thing – I don’t know if Prince is going to succeed with his actions against internet giants. He surely has the point in what he’s trying to achieve, but take a look at a war on drugs and use it as an example to see the outcome of this. Even if Prince succeeds and any of the websites is shut down, there will be a new one started right away to take its place and the same story, different version will take place again.
PS – I searched for Prince on YouTube and no results came up… But that doesn’t necessarily mean there are no videos of Princes music on there as they could be listed under song titles or maybe under the label’s name – Universal Music Group.
