While the music world lost an icon in Prince, many artists and attorneys in the intellectual property legal industry also remember Prince for his zealous enforcement of copyright protection and artists’ rights. Relying on existing law and creating new legal precedents, Prince was not shy about enforcing his legal rights amid an increasingly hostile Internet age. In stark contrast to the many artists, both established and new, that chose to embrace digital distribution and the accompanying exposure garnered from social media platforms, Prince took the opposite approach. While many artists maintained their own YouTube channels in attempts to control the distribution of their music, Prince released the statement: “Prince believes it wrong for YouTube, or any user-generated site, to appropriate his music without his consent.” While his attempts to police digital sharing of his work did not go unnoticed and often polarized fans, the legal disputes led to important legal precedent, even if Prince did not consistently prevail.

In 2008, for example, Prince, through Universal Music Corporation, brought suit in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp., a case that revolved around a twenty-nine second home video of Lenz’s two children dancing to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy.” Ruling against Prince and Universal, the California district court ruled that Universal failed to consider that the home video’s use of Prince’s song could qualify as fair use. In 2015, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the 2008 finding, stating that copyright holders must consider fair use in good faith before issuing takedown notices.

As more and more social media platforms emerged, Prince maintained his hardline stance, demanding that Twitter remove Vine video clips that he believed to infringe upon his copyrights in 2013. His copyright stances and takedown notices earned him the ire of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on “defending civil liberties in the digital world.” Indeed, the EFF established the “Raspberry Beret Lifetime Aggrievement Award,” bestowing the inaugural title on Prince for “his willingness to exploit the notice-and-takedown procedure for censorship.” The next year, in 2014, Prince sued twenty-two anonymous fans for $1 million each when they posted links to pirated copies of bootleg concert videos. He willingly dropped the suits, however, after the offending links were removed.

Prince was well within rights to choose however aggressively he wanted to enforce his copyrights. While his music will continue to help him live on for millions, artists and attorneys alike can also acknowledge and appreciate the legal challenges that Prince confronted while enforcing copyrights in our increasingly digitized world.

For more information on this topic, please visit our Copyright Protection service page, which is part of our Software & Copyrights practice.

Klemchuk LLP is an Intellectual Property (IP), Technology, Internet, and Business law firm located in Dallas, TX.  The firm offers comprehensive legal services including litigation and enforcement of all forms of IP as well as registration and licensing of patents, trademarks, trade dress, and copyrights.  The firm also provides a wide range of technology, Internet, e-commerce, and business services including business planning, formation, and financing, mergers and acquisitions, business litigation, data privacy, and domain name dispute resolution.  Additional information about the copyright law firm and its copyright attorneys may be found at www.klemchuk.com.

Klemchuk LLP hosts Culture Counts, a blog devoted to the discussion of law firm culture and corporate core values with frequent topics about positive work environment, conscious capitalism, entrepreneurial management, positive workplace culture, workplace productivity, and corporate core values.