music

Apparently Prince, in lieu of a career, spends his time scouring the net for instances of “copyright violation”.

A well-placed source directly involved in the situation confirmed to ABC News that Prince was directly involved in seeking the takedown of Lenz’s video.

“This guy scours the Internet,” the source said of the legendary artist, who once changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol and wrote the word “Slave'” on his cheek until he won back the rights to his music from another publishing company.

“He’s really intense about this stuff,” the source said, adding that Lenz’s video “happened to be one of many” that artist apparently located online and demanded be taken down.

The violation in question involves 29 seconds, yes that’s right 29 seconds of Let’s Go Crazy Baby, in a home video of a baby. Serious stuff.

Prince petitioned YouTube to take down the video, which they did. However, in a classic case of don’t get mad, get even, Stephanie Lenz has filed suit;

“I thought even though I didn’t do anything wrong that they might want to file some kind of suit against me, take my house, come after me.

“And I didn’t like feeling afraid,” she continued. “I didn’t like feeling that I could get in trouble for something as simple as posting a home video for my friends and family to see.”

She contacted a leading cyber rights legal organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and filed a civil lawsuit against the music publisher, claiming they were abusing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by sending out reams of what are known in the industry as “take down notices” to Web sites like YouTube, claiming their artists’ copyrights had been infringed upon — when in fact, sometimes they may not have been at all.

Youtube has put the video back up.