Prince has filed a lawsuit against 22 individuals, suing each of them for $1 million for posting alleged bootlegged videos of his life performances, thereby committing copyright infringement.
Filed in the Northern District of California on Jan. 22, the lawsuit reads, “The Defendants in this case engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince’s material,” which amounts to “up to thousands of separate acts of infringement and bootlegging.”
Only two of the individual Prince fans are named in the suit – Dan Chodera and Karina Jindrova who operated the kristynafanpage Facebook. The other defendants have only been named by their online user names. Among the user names are PurpleHouse2 and PurpleKissTwo.
"Defendants rely on either Google's Blogger platform or Facebook, or both, to accomplish their unlawful activity," the court papers read. "Rather than publishing lawful content to their blogs, they typically publish posts that list all the songs performed at a certain Prince live show and then provide a link to a file-sharing service where unauthorized copies of the performance can be downloaded.
According to the suit, the actions of the fan pages ”constitute an interconnected network of bootleg distribution which is able to broadly disseminate unauthorized copies of Prince’s musical compositions and live performances.”
"Prince has suffered and is continuing to suffer damages in an amount according to proof, but no less than $1 million per Defendant," the suit continued.
A somewhat notorious luddite, Prince has previously fought fan sites for posting copyrighted images and sued file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, according to the New York Daily News. The musician ended up opting out of suing the fan sites and lost the court battle against Pirate Bay.
– Chelsea Regan
Get Uinterview's FREE iPhone App For Daily News Updates here.
Get the FREE Uinterview iPad app here and watch our videos anywhere.
Protesters were seen barricading and confronting police as thousands took to the streets on Thursday…
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/F_HSPpjvL_c Video posted by pro-opposition media in Syria on Nov. 29 shows militants in Aleppo’s…
https://youtu.be/-yw6TflL4nc Thousands of Georgians gathered outside the country’s parliament on Nov. 28, to protest their…
Lizzo left fans speechless with her weight loss transformation during a night out with her…
Robinson explained her own draw to the story, "When I first read the script…I think…
Sean Combs’ proposal for his house arrest to take place on his private island in…