Just weeks after causing outrage among the major record labels by giving his latest album away free with a Sunday newspaper, pop superstar Prince has threatened to sue YouTube for allowing unauthorised videos of his performances to be posted on their website.

A spokesperson for Prince stated “Very few artists have ever taken this kind of action over their rights, yet Prince has shown time and time again he is ready to challenge the system in new ways to put artists and music first.” In their defence, YouTube responded by saying that they were working with artists to help them manage their music on the site. “Most content owners understand that we respect copyrights, we work every day to help them manage their content, and we are developing state-of-the-art tools to let them do that even better.” said YouTube chief counsel Zahavah Levine.

Since making his intentions known, more than 1,000 unauthorised clips of Prince performing at London’s O2 Arena have been removed from Youtube.

Could this be the end of YouTube as we know it?

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Big Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.