It has been a few years since the sad and untimely passing of Prince, but that doesn’t mean that his legend doesn’t live on. If not in his music, then in his image protection that drove some of his biggest fans insane online.
Just to give you young whipper-snappers a quick history lesson, Prince fell out with his then publishing label Warner Bros. quite badly. Put simply, he felt that as an artist the publisher removed a lot of his creative control, specifically to pump out albums in copious amounts. I won’t go into the details, but let’s just say that there was a case to be made on both sides of the argument.
Why mention this? Well, ever since, Prince regulated his image and material with exceptional harshness. Even fan videos taken at concerts were removed from YouTube and put simply, some of his biggest fans had to go a little underground on the internet to share his concert videos and more obscure and rare music tracks.
Although YouTube has become a little more friendly for Prince content since his passing, it might surprise you to learn that one of the longest-running battles on the video site has only just been settled. The video below was posted around 11 years ago and features a baby ‘dancing’ to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy”. Fairly innocent and innocuous right? Well, remember what I said earlier. Well, for 11 years, Universal has been fighting that video due to the simple inclusion of a Prince song. I should note that the song isn’t dubbed over the video. It just happened to be playing in the house and the baby just happened to dance to it.
Stephanie Lenz originally posted the video of her son dancing back in 2007. In a report via the BBC, since then Universal (who now own the rights to Prince’s music) attempted to have the video removed. Incredibly, since then this (sorry mom) relatively boring video has been the subject of a legal tussle. One which neither party seemingly wanted to back down over.
After 11 years though, it seems that both parties have now come to some agreement. As such, the video has been allowed to remain on YouTube. The exact terms of the agreement are unknown. I would speculate that Universal might just get any advertising revenue it generates, but I could be entirely wrong.
This does, however, again bring up the whole issue of Prince and the protection of his image. If you’re not a fan of his music or at least his talent, you can at the very least appreciate the way he clamped down on his material on the internet. This, even before Metallica started getting upset about Napster.
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