Fans turn Prince purple with rage, then move him to song

Earlier this year Holden Lenz was filmed at home in Pennsylvania by his mother. It was an innocuous 29-second clip of the 18-month- old child dancing to Prince's Let's Go Crazy. Mum posted the clip on YouTube, where it initially attracted little interest - 28 hits over a period of months.

The clip has now been viewed some 360,000 times and is at the centre of a bizarre legal case. Holden's mother Stephanie is suing Universal Music, Prince's record company, for abuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In June, Stephanie Lenz received an e-mail from YouTube informing that her video had been removed from the site at the behest of Universal Music. It's suspected that Prince himself came across the video and instructed his label to get it removed.

Legally, of course, Prince is within his rights: the video does infringe copyright as it contains a piece of his work. However this must be the most disgusting act of disregard by a musician to a member of the public since Pink Floyd's Roger Waters spat in the face of a fan at a concert in Canada in 1977.

Stephanie Lenz has insisted that her video remain on the site pending the legal action she is taking, and you have only to read the comments below the video to realise the damage Prince has done to himself by his actions. And he hasn't stopped at toddlers. The singer has enlisted an army of lawyers to trawl through amateur internet fan sites to purge all of photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to his likeness.

A coalition of Prince fan sites, calling itself Prince Fans United, is fighting back, saying this threat of legal action "is not being made in an attempt of enforce valid copyright as Prince alleges, rather we believe they are attempts to stifle all critical commentary about Prince. Prince claims that fan sites are not allowed to present any artwork with Prince's likeness, to the extreme that he has demanded removal of fan's own photographs of their Prince inspired tattoos and their vehicles displaying Prince inspired license plates."

Prince once took on his own label during his self-proclaimed "slave" years (a move that ended in stalemate), but taking on his own fans seems a bit preposterous, even by the man's own eccentric standards.

In the past week, though, Prince thawed a bit on the copyright issue. A spokesperson issued a "clarification": "Prince is not suing his fans, is not looking to penalise fans and nor is he looking to or inhibiting freedom of speech in any way. In fact, he is simply looking to provide Prince fans with exclusive music and images entirely free of charge, and bypassing unofficial and unauthorised phoney fan sites that exploit both consumers and artists."

Prince has registered the www.princefamsunited.com website and posted a song named PFUnk, aimed at appeasing his disgruntled fans with lyrics such as "I love all y'all, but don't you ever mess with me no more".

Both parties are now trying to settle the matter out of court. If only he could be charged with having acted like a complete tit, the fans coalition would have a cast iron case.

Why an artist of such magnificent talent should be getting into a legal tizzy about licence plates made up in his honour remains a mystery.

"Fan rage" by musicians seems to be quite the thing these days. In a very different case, Dolores O'Riordan set the lawyers on Alex Kraus, who has been diligently running the www.zombieguide.com fan site for the past nine years. The issue here is that Kraus registered the www. dolores oriordan.com domain name and was allegedly using it to direct people to www.zombie guide.com. Kraus has now closed down his zombie site, but it has yet to be decided who ends up owning www.dolores oriordan.com.