Prince, you are the KING of the goat-felchers!

The BBQ Pit
1

I posted this in another thread:

As some may know, I have a (very) small business shooting concerts. I bring a backpack full of equipment to a venue, and do a one-man video shoot from seven different angles (I joke that I’ve developed a business model for ADHD). My biggest customers are various locations of the School of Rock. The kids of each School perform a dozen or so shows each year devoted to a particular artist, band, genre or event. As they are covering songs, it is a technical violation of the copyright, although the School has paid for sync rights for the music, their own ASCAP and BMI fees for performance, and the venue pays those fees as well.

There are three levels of copyright violation on YouTube.

"You don’t own the rights to this song…

[ol]
[li]…but that’s cool. We’re just going to put ads for the original next to your video.“[/li][li] …no, nobody can cover this song. We’re going to mute the audio so nobody can hear your rendition.”[/li][li] …and we’re issuing an Official DMCA Takedown notice against you! Three of these things and you lose your entire account!"[/li][/ol]

99.99% of all music owners have chosen option #1. It works for them, and they get ads to sell their recording right before someone who has just searched for and listened to a cover of that music. Everybody wins.

.01% of music owners have chosen option #2. The only one I have encountered in that space is Led Zeppelin. Apparently, they have a blanket policy that nobody gets to link Stairway to Heaven to visuals. OK, fine. A little disappointing when the kids have done a really good job, but fine.

Prince is, in my experience, the entirety of option #3. I woke up one morning to find that “Controversy Music” had issued DMCA Takedown Notices against two of my videos. Only by swiftly deleting the other two Prince videos I had on my channel did I avoid losing every single video I have on my channel.

[ul]
[li]All of which is my own videography.[/li][li]All of which is by performers that I had permission to shoot.[/li][li]In a venue where I had permission to shoot.[/li][/ul]

The only party in this who objected to this was Mr. Pissy Pants. Options #1 and #2 were not good enough for this nasty little piece of shit.

And you know what? The performances by the kids were amazing! One of them was of an unreleased track called The Undertaker and had over 10,000 views. An…unreleased…fucking…track. What possible harm could be done to the market for Prince’s music for someone to cover an unreleased track?!?

I will never see him in concert again, and have no further desire to hear any of his music. He’s burned all his bridges with me.

ETA: I really should make a “Hitler gets a DMCA notice for his cover of Purple Rain from Prince” video.

2

So, now that this is in the Pit, is anyone else as annoyed with this egotastic little shithead as I am?

3

Nope. You don’t get to choose how Prince controls his intellectual property.

4

But certainly he can have an opinion on how Prince controls his intellectual property, right?

5

He wouldn’t let Weird Al cover his songs either, as I recall. Doesn’t matter. Prince is amazing and I love him forever.

6

The thing is, the video was only partly his intellectual property. The performances were the intellectual property of the individual kids. All the video and audio recordings were my intellectual property. The only part Dingbat owned was the composition. And the way he did this did not allow me to even challenge it! (The challenge thing allows the user to dispute a copyright claim - like some asshole publisher did when I posted a video I shot of a pianist playing a piece by Scartlatti - who fucking DIED in 1757!)

Why does the creator of only one part get to over-rule everyone else, and do it in a way that rules out any challenge?

Oh, and YouTube? Fuck you and your insulting little fucking “Copyright School” cartoon that you forced me to watch and answer a motherfucking QUIZ about!

7

Actually, we (the American public) do get to control it. Intellectual Property is an artificial construct meant to stimulate new art/music/whatever by giving a limited copyright to the creator. But it’s gotten out of control, thanks to industry lobbying, and the limited copyright has become perpetual and overreaching. If the voting public gets sick enough of this, they can demand change in the laws.

The actual purpose of copyright protection is to encourage new work, not to perpetually enrich music industry execs or guys who wrote a hit song thirty years ago. Prince being able to take down Youtube videos in 2013 does nothing to stimulate new artistic works.

8

FUCK THAT SHIT!!!

Weird Al doesn’t have to ask the little pisher for permission at all! He only asks as a courtesy, because, unlike the Purple Putz, he’s a nice guy.

9

I must have missed the part of the OP where he said he wanted to do that.

10

Prince is himself probably not even aware of what happened. Do you actually think that he, himself, has the time or the inclination? I doubt his legal team — or whoever handles such matters on his behalf – even bothered to inform him of the action they’d taken.

11

He’s MY man. Get your own.

12

But now Scarlatti can rest easy. :slight_smile:

13

Prince is a nice guy. I’ve read tons of interviews with him, and everyone who works with him says he’s super nice (if a bit eccentric). He’s just really really protective of his art. And I don’t hold that against him, because he is amazing. When you start to write music as fantastic as his, we’ll talk.

14

:frowning:

15

Gaffa you know what I do for a living. I am sorry you have had to take your videos down but Prince has every legal right to demand that you do. You Tube is a commercial venture. That said there is no good reason that a simple rights payment formula for these kinds of performances cannot be negotiated, You Tube makes money. I think this is more a place where the law has not kept up with reality or the RIAA are just being well, the RIAA.

I have a suggestion, write Controversy Music and explain what you are doing, then ask permission. You might just find that he is more than willing to accommodate you and the kids.

Good Luck

Capt

16

i will not nor will i ever be a patron of any product made by what’s his name.

17

Re-read the OP. As I said, there are three levels of response, and Prince (I blame him - he is responsible for acts done in his name by his lawyers and he should fire them if they do otherwise) chose the MegaDick® response.

I have 300+ videos on my channel, with a huge number of kids performing a huge variety of material by a wide range of artists. The vast majority fall into category #1, which is that the content was identified, a copyright claim was made, and an ad for a recording by the songwriter appears right next to the performance by the kids. So a video of the kids are performing “Sir Duke” by Stevie Wonder (who has several times more talent than Prince, and you could probably get him to agree if you got him drunk)has an ad for the original recording. Everybody happy.

Yeah…that’s not going to happen. In every case, when anyone asks permission for anything, the lawyers refuse. That is their job. And lawyers are, in general, lazy. If they wanted to work hard, they would have become doctors.

Again, I’m one strike away from losing everything on my channel, and both strikes were issued on the same night, by the same motherfucker. The bank might have the right to evict me from my house, but not to set fire to it with me inside.

18

I thought for cover recordings / performances you could get a “compulsory mechanical license” in which the original copyright holder does not have the option to deny you the use, whether they want you to perform their song or not.

I also believe I’ve heard Weird Al say that many of his versions of songs would fall under fair use or parody exceptions to copyright, but that as a matter of courtesy he doesn’t record songs without the original artist permission.

19

Why?

20

Prince worked on a recording with Kate Bush. Readthis by posting by Michael Koppelman about working as his recording engineer:

That’s somebody who worked directly with him, and he comes across as a suffering from a rather severe case of Little Man Syndrome.