The artist formerly (and now again) known as Prince is NOT a fan of Vines, it seems. In a move that screams “dramatic,” the uniquely symboled one’s company claims the six-second clips violate copyright.
This IS important to note though, because it raises important questions around fair use . . . and ridiculousness.
NPG Records, the label owned by Prince, sent a Music DMCA Copyright Complaint to Twitter that said, in part:
We hereby request that you immediately remove our content 8 video clips from the vine.co platform, as accessible via the above links, as well as all other occurrences on the vine.co platform.
And Twitter apparently complied as the clips are no longer accessible. But is NPG overstepping here?
ReadWrite makes a good point about us not going crazy with copyright – and that maybe it’s time for some changes.
Whether or not six seconds of a Prince song in a user-generated video constitutes fair use is something for a court to decide. If it’s not, though — if uploading a crappy, six-second video that contains someone’s song turns out to be illegal — we have to ask ourselves some pretty fundamental questions about copyright and what it’s for.
Whatever replaces the current copyright framework will need to balance the rights and financial interests of creators with the fact that we have a completely new way of creating and sharing culture and media than we did a few decades ago.
What do you think?
And one final note: This story is almost as good as the take down notice from the Twitter co-founder’s new company complaining they had tried multiple times to get in touch with Twitter over a logo infringement . . . and couldn’t. Check out that one later when you have a free minute.
(Prince image from Shutterstock)

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