Prince: not a creep, not a weirdo, not on YouTube (or in Croker)

Brian Boydon music.

SINCE Tuesday, websites, airwaves and newspapers have been speculating over why Prince's Croke Park gig is not taking place next week. It remains to be seen just who is responsible, but one thing's for sure: the 55,000 ticket holders aren't the first of his fans to question whether the Purple One really deserves their devotion.

The annual Coachella Festival takes place every April in a parched California desert. Coachella is known for getting feuding musicians to reunite - usually for a huge pay cheque. Over the years, The Pixies, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Gang of Four and Kraftwerk have all renounced their "never again" vows in order to play the festival.

The "reformation" acts at this year's festival were Portishead and The Verve, but they aren't all that big in the US, so organisers were left with a major headlining slot to fill.

Brought in at a fee of $4.8 million, Prince had the desired effect (tickets sold out within seconds). However, his Coachella performance may well be remembered for something other than the being the festival's most expensive act ever.

Midway through his set, Prince launched into a very unlikely cover version of Radiohead's Creep. He extended the song by a few minutes, gave it a soul sheen and changed the lyrics from "I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo" to "you're a creep, you're a weirdo".

A friend of Thom Yorke's was at the show and texted the Radiohead man about the song. Anxious to see what Prince had done with Creep, Yorke went to YouTube to view fan footage of the performance. When he found it, however, the video wouldn't play and a message stated that "this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NPG Records".

NPG (Prince's own label) had contacted Google/YouTube and told them the Coachella performance of Creepwas copyrighted by Prince and couldn't go up on the video-sharing site.

Prince does have form here: he already had most of his clips erased from YouTube, citing "copyright" issues, and has otherwise generally hassled any fans who so much as post a photograph of him on a fan website.

There is now a stand-off between YouTube, Prince and Thom Yorke as to who actually owns the footage. Yorke has been quoted as saying "Tell him to unblock it - it's our song". It appears YouTube didn't know what to do and took the clip down on Prince's request while waiting for someone to come up with a robust legal definition of who owns it.

Meanwhile, Prince fans (and non-fans) have been playing a cat-and-mouse with whoever is responsible for taking down YouTube clips. The Creepfootage keeps getting posted and keeps getting blocked. It was available on Pitchfork for a while, but now that too has been removed. If you search for it outside of YouTube, you will find numerous links, but it seems that the clips are taken down within hours.

This sort of tangled legal scenario was never envisaged when the music copyright laws (now hopelessly out of date) were being written. What is clear is that if Prince had recorded the version of Creephe played at Coachella, he would have been in clear breach of copyright laws. You can only get a licence to record a cover if you agree that you won't change the lyrics of the song. This is to stop people putting in unsuitable/ libellous/political lyrical messages into well-known songs. If Prince had wanted to use the line "You're a creep, you're a weirdo" on a recorded version of Creepthen he would have had to get advance permission from the song's copyright holders: Radiohead and their publishing company.

Where the law stands on a live, as opposed to a recorded, cover version remains a moot point - there are rights in composition (Radiohead) and rights in performance (Prince), but which outweighs which? If Radiohead want the clip unblocked, the lyric change breach is surely one legal avenue they could explore.

The stupid thing is that Prince's cover of Creephas been described by reviewers as "spine-tingling" and "one of Coachella's best-ever moments".

If you really want to piss Prince off (consider it moral retaliation) hunt down the Creep clip and e-mailit to everyone you know.