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Vine becomes the latest battleground in Prince's crusade against illicit recordings

Vine becomes the latest battleground in Prince's crusade against illicit recordings

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Prince Vine
Prince Vine

Vine launched less than three months ago, but the first DMCA takedown notices are already coming in. Among the first rights holders to file a grievance with Twitter is NPG Records, Prince's music label. Prince, of course, has earned a somewhat unflattering reputation for his tireless efforts to hunt down unauthorized fan recordings across the web and have them obliterated. He's waged a public war with YouTube over what he insists are lackluster measures to protect copyrighted material. The relentless strategy has at times drawn the scorn of other artists.

Now it seems the legendary musician's label is unhappy about six-second snippets appearing on Twitter's young video service. Chilling Effects, a watchdog site where Twitter publicizes such takedown requests, reveals that on March 22nd, NPG Records contacted the company and asked for eight videos to be brought down. As best we can tell, Twitter complied with the request, as none of the URLs are currently functioning. Vine hasn't been confronted by rights holders to the same degree as YouTube — likely owing to the brevity of hosted clips and their whimsical nature. Clearly neither of those factors were enough to shield Vine from Prince's herculean quest to protect his content.