Prince's official website, 3121.com, has responded to the news yesterday that representatives of the singer had sent cease and desist letters to three fan based web communities ordering them to remove trademarks and photos owned by the singer or his companies. As reported yesterday, the owners of those web communities have former Prince Fans United in a bid to fight the singer should he go through with the legal threats he has made against them.
3121 says that the three Prince Fans United communities - princefams.com, housequake.com and prince.org - had incorrectly positioned Prince's legal letter as an attack on freedom of speech, arguing that the dispute was based around differing interpretations of intellectual property laws and was nothing to do with the First Amendment.
They said in a statement: "This issue is entirely about the use of Prince trademarks and photographs (many of which 3121 controls the copyright to) and is purely to do with the administrators of three unofficial Prince websites, whose views on intellectual property laws differ greatly from 3121's, but who 3121 has nevertheless been in months of dialogue with in an effort to reach agreement".
The official site also claimed that the Prince Fans United sites were wrongly positioning themselves as the champions of Prince fans worldwide, arguing that they "only represent a tiny fraction of Prince's global fanbase". They also accused the owners of the fan communities of themselves blocking freedom of speech by banning anyone with an official tie to the singer from joining, and by removing one posting that outlined the official Prince line regarding the use of copyright images on the communities.
Finally they claim Prince Fans United are causing a distraction to Prince's real copyright battles - against the illegal distribution of his content via sites like The Pirate Bay and YouTube, and the illegal sale of Prince goods on sites like eBay. The statement concludes "hopefully these sites will soon stop deflecting attention away from the REAL battles that 3121 has been fighting on the internet against notorious sites such as Pirate Bay and other pirate and bootleg sites and against sellers of counterfeit goods on eBay - and much more that goes on behind-the-scenes".