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.

Prince Sues Fans $1 Million Each

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

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