Prince vs. YouTube and eBay?

Legendary performer Prince wants YouTube and eBay to do more to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their sites without his permission. In the case of YouTube, Computerworld reported yesterday that Prince has hired an "Internet policing specialist" named John Giacobbi to help the artist get clips of his music removed from the online video sharing site. He says that while YouTube has obliged in removing thousands of clips, users have reposted the files.

According to Giacobbi, "since they were bought for $5.5 million by Google, you'd think they'd have a healthy [research and development] budget to invest in technology for filtering. We would imagine they have the capabilities." (note: YouTube was actually purchased for $1.65 billion.)

The claim against eBay is that the auction site should be stopping the sale of unauthorized Prince merchandise on its auction site. Giacobbi says that Prince is considering legal action against the two Net companies. You can read the entire article here.