Prince to sue The Pirate Bay
Continuing an aggressive campaign to defend his copyrights, pop star Prince is preparing to file lawsuits within the next few days in three countries--including the United States--against The Pirate Bay, CNET News.com has learned.
John Giacobbi
(Credit: Web Sheriff)One of the world's best-known BitTorrent indexing sites, The Pirate Bay has defiantly linked to pirated copies of films, TV shows, music videos, and other content while often boasting that it ignores Hollywood's requests to remove them. The Pirate Bay does not host any unauthorized content, but the service is internationally famous for being a highly effective file-sharing tool.
Prince will file similar suits against The Pirate Bay in the U.S., France, a country with laws favorable to copyright owners, and Sweden, where The Pirate Bay is based. In addition, Prince is preparing to take civil action against companies that advertise on The Pirate Bay, many of which are headquartered in Israel, according to John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff's president.
Prince has hired Giacobbi and Web Sheriff, a service that protects copyright materials from Internet piracy, to coordinate the legal challenges against The Pirate Bay and others who the singer believes has violated his copyright.
Giacobbi said Web Sheriff is also helping to launch an investigation into The Pirate Bay's off-shore connections to determine whether the company is compliant with Swedish and international income and corporation tax laws.
The Pirate Bay has already weathered several attempts by the governments of Sweden and the United States to shut down the site. Yet, this is likely the largest civil challenge the Web site has ever faced.
At the core of Prince's lawsuits are his claims that the three founders of The Pirate Bay are profiting from the work of artists without compensating them. The Pirate Bay earns $70,000 a month in advertising revenue, Giacobbi alleged. The site's founders have previously denied that the operation makes money.
None of the three founders of The Pirate Bay could be reached for comment.
The Pirate Bay Founders, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm
(Credit: Pontus Alexander/Fabian Landgren)
Prince, who Giacobbi said has the backing of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, the group that represents the recording industry worldwide, is only adding to The Pirate Bay's legal troubles. The site founders also face criminal charges, according to a story published Thursday on the blog TorrentFreak.
A prosecutor in Sweden announced that he plans to press charges against five people involved with The Pirate Bay before January 31, 2008, the blog reported. The five are being accused of infringing on intellectual property.
The copyright battle that Prince has waged the past two months has not been without its costs. He was widely criticized this week when three unauthorized fan sites accused him of trying to violate their free speech rights when his handlers demanded that they remove several photos of him.
It was widely reported this week that Prince had begun suing fans. His representatives denied this.
"Prince is not suing his fans, is not looking to penalize fans and nor is he looking to inhibiting freedom of speech in any way," said AEG, Prince's promoter.
Prince began making headlines in September after lashing out against sites he believed were violating his intellectual-property rights.
In September, the singer said he planned to take legal action against The Pirate Bay, YouTube, and eBay. As of Friday, Prince's lawsuits appeared to be solely targeted at The Pirate Bay.
By suing The Pirate Bay in three different countries, Prince is hoping to put financial pressure on the service, Giacobbi said. Copyright laws in the United States and France would also make it nearly impossible for a site like The Pirate Bay to triumph, he claimed.
"There is no way that they will have any defense because it's blatant piracy," Giacobbi said. "They'll either have to come out and fight or just try and ignore it. In that case, we're going to win a default judgment against them. This could be a ticking time bomb for them. They can't outrun this. We are very confident."
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. He is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sandoCNET. 
>some of the Israel-based companies that advertise on The Pirate
>Bay, according to John Giacobbi, Web Sheriff's president.
Yeah, let's sue anyone who advertises on the site, they must be responsible for what people do
with it...
>Besides the U.S., Prince will file suit within in the next few
>days against The Pirate Bay in France, a country known for
>tough copyright laws
Yep, let's sue the people responsible in a country that he isn't in, and that they aren't in simply
because the laws are more favourable. Nice work there :)
Have a beef with someone? Sue them. Why go through other less destructive channels when there's money to be made litigating? Ugh, what a world, what a world.
First he's against his own fans, now this?
He was the first to have the opportunity to sell directly to fans and make it work. He is so out of touch, it's sad.
a.) Kinda crazy.
b.) Extremely controlling over everything and anything involving him and his art.
With these lawsuits, everyone else is starting to see it too. For proof, watch "An Evening with Kevin Smith" and listen to him talk about working on a documentary for Prince.
Enjoy.. I know I did.
longtime
The dude's a legend as far as I'm concerned--from Wikipedia: In the 1980s and early 1990s, Prince was romantically linked to many celebrities, including Vanity (also known as Denise Matthews), Madonna, Sheila E, Anna Fantastic,Carmen Electra,Kirstie Alley, Whitney Houston, Apollonia Kotero, Kim Basinger, Sheena Easton, Troy Beyer, Susanna Hoffs and Nona Gaye. He married his backup singer and dancer, Mayte Garcia on Valentine's Day, 1996
C'mon people, Tommy Lee was married to Pamela Anderson and now he has Prince's seconds. Some respect, please. So before you write your stupid little comment, think about whether you can get tens of thousands of people at the next Super Bowl screaming and singing to your music.
And, just like the Metallica debacle, I'm quite sure that will happen.
Ironic, isn't it? Prince is encouraging the very thing he is suing to stop.
I know it must be hard to actually have to work for a living - but that's life and Prince should go ahead and learn that now.
He gave his last album away free on the cover of newspapers and it was so awful that even for free no one wanted it.
The little purple elf must be snorting some really expensive cocaine if he's worried about his percieved cashflow dent caused by TPB.
Or.
He could sue Al Gore I mean he did invent the internet and start this whole thing.
since then I have stepped away from the dark side.
personally i love The Pirate Bay, and as a swede now living in CA, it allows me to get access to Scandinavian TV and radio shows that I can't get here, including very popular out-of-print children's programs. i don't own a TV since American network TV SUCKS. US cable TV is way over priced, so I'm basically using TPB as TV and an occasional movie on demand service. with my introduction to TPB a few years ago my media consumption has increased considerably, and I now spend thousands of dollars each year on DVDs and CDs (compared to a few hundred before). I also donate money to PBS who's programs that I tend to prefer.
this is what attorneys and non-internet culture people don't understand, it's a diverse world out there, and there is plenty of moral in a global community that interacts and support each other very well. but they just see the world in black and white with their corporate glasses on.
Consumers want as much as they can get on their big home storage systems not to mention want to have accesses to more services possible with faster internet technology.
Pirate bay wants to make money.
The ability to share data from many sources is the very fondation of the internet making it as universal as it is.
The problem here is that the coperate view is too narrow to allow the internet to progress and yet the coperate model is by far the dominant model.
My hope here is that the co-operative world of networking and the coperate world of banking clash to from the best options.
It's up to us us to make sure that this is so and that the Narrow interest band continues to widen in a way that respects the creative issues of human efforts.
Things are moving this way more and more each year but so too are many groups used to the perpetuation of the current economic model curently in process.
So anyway i hope that things work out well here.
Metallica after they sued Napster? They all but
disappeared as a band and few people wanted
their music anymore. Maybe Prince needs to learn
a lesson from Radio Head and NIN.
because the only income he's got left is that of his old music. Let's
hope Prince drowns in his own Purple Rain..
Jamendo.com
Open your ears.
Sounds like Prince is a little narsistic.
Sounds like Prince is a little narcissistic in his own views of his popularity.
I like it better when his songs are sung by different artists that have way more talent that Prince claims to have. He should rename his album as "Purple Pain" because it is painful for me to listen to it.
- prince to sue pirate bay
- by krosavcheg November 10, 2007 10:58 PM PST
- I personally wouldn't walk across the street to hear prince, but I do sympathize with the little fella.....doesn't even know where his next million's coming from.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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