Prince Sues 22 Alleged Bootleggers For $1 Million Each

You DO have to be rich if you want to bootleg his tunes.

Superstar singer Prince is on the warpath and suing his online fans for allegedly posting links to illegal downloads of his live shows.

The artist formerly known as a symbol is taking aim at 22 people — and wants a staggering $1million from each of them.

Prince Rogers Nelson, to give his full name, filed a lawsuit alleging copyright infringement in the Northern District of California on Monday.

It lists the full identities of two people — Dan Chodera and Karina Jindrova.

Twenty online user names — many of which are Prince-related, such as "PurpleHouse2" and "PurpleKissTwo" — are also being sued.

"The Defendants in this case engage in massive infringement and bootlegging of Prince's material," the lawsuit, news of which was first reported by TorrentFreak, claims.

It alleges one of the individuals had 363 infringing links to file sharing services hosting Prince bootlegs. It also claims the majority of the links were on Facebook-based fan pages and Google's Blogger network.

"Prince has suffered and is continuing to suffer damages in an amount according to proof, but no less than $1 million per Defendant," the suit adds.

"Defendants rely on either Google's Blogger platform or Facebook, or both, to accomplish their unlawful activity," the Independent reports the court papers as saying.

"Rather than publishing lawful content to their blogs, they typically publish posts that list all the songs performed at a certain Prince live show and then provide a link to a file-sharing service where unauthorized copies of the performance can be downloaded," it adds.




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