prince.org staff blog

The highly-respected Prince Podcast hosted by longtime orger (from day one!) Michael Dean did an interview with me last night. It was fun to talk with MDean about the history of the Org, music, and my feelings about the current situation. It’s pretty long, but if you’re curious to know a little more about me and the org, worth a listen!

You can download it directly from his entry about the prince.org interview, or grab it via iTunes. Heck, why not subscribe to the feed and get some of the past episodes while you’re at it? It’s good listening… he’s always got interesting guests (well, except for last night ) and fascinating conversations.

Personally, I don’t know if I thanked the org moderators enough in the podcast… that’s who is really responsible for the site’s success, especially the last 5 years. Maybe we can do a podcast with some of the mods one day? That would be fun! What do you guys think? (Also, vote in the poll on the homepage!)

Hi all… some of you may be aware of the WebSheriff stuff going on, which has affected most of the big Prince fan sites, with each getting a DMCA infringement notice. Basically, this is a letter from an authorized agent of Prince, saying that something on the site infringes his copyright, and must be removed. The interesting thing is that, as part of the DMCA law in the USA, the letter is sent to the service provider, not the site owner directly. So for example, the company that we rent servers from, got the letter and passed it along to us. The letter basically stated (I will include more details later), that there were ~3,500 images in our ‘gallery’ section, that infringed Prince’s copyrights, trademark, or other intellectual property. The way the DMCA notice works, is that the site owner has two choices: 1. take the material down, or 2. file a counter notice to say the material is not infringing, and that they accept being sued within 14 days.

Now, there’s no way that all the images we were asked to remove were infringing–it included images of people’s tattoos, their cars, scans from books that had nothing to do with Prince, newspaper clippings, wire image bureau images, etc. Lots of stuff which might be copyrighted, or not, but certainly, images and images of items, that Prince does not own the rights to (under the DMCA, the rights owner of the specific item being asked to be removed must file the complaint). There were also other problems with the specifics of the request that lead us at prince.org to believe it’s invalid, and we’re following up on that angle as well. Put simply, we believe this to be a bogus, incomplete, and certainly overly broad, even fairly sloppy, request. (In this article I don’t want to get into the “is this fair” or “why is Prince doing this” issues; that’s the topic for another day, and another message.)

That said, you may be surprised to learn that I have decided to temporarily make these images unavailable, nearly 3,500 of them. I would prefer not to, of course, and believe there is no legitimate reason why I should… but this is a purely practical matter. Our service provider, the good people (really!) we rent servers from, aren’t legally in a position to debate the correctness of each image and the request–this isn’t their primary role. They will simply take the ’safe’ road and shut down our server (or something similar, with the same effect) unless we remove them, or else they become liable to be sued. The DMCA is imbalanced in this regard, but this is the reality (remember, this was enacted by the same people who brought you the Patriot Act!) So, essentially, I’ve disabled access to these images so that while prince.org can secure a thorough legal analysis, we aren’t shut down. After all, the image gallery is a small part of the site, and I wouldn’t want to risk having the chat and forums go offline while we wrangle over this… there is principle, and honor, involved here, but this site exists to serve you, the community visitor and site member, and if we’re offline we’re not serving anyone, no pun intended

So, that’s the quick update… there’s fewer images in the gallery right now, but they’re not gone, we’re just working through legal silliness. The site will continue to run and provide the unofficial, semi-random, relatively unfettered and hopefully entertaining discussions it always has. Watch the staff blog for continuing updates…

[Edited to fix the grammar on the title... feh! -Ben]

Got to spend some time working on the org today, and here’s the results:

1. Fixed bug: the “explanation” for the random quote under the navigation, wasn’t explaining anything (was a blank popup window).
2. Fixed bug: adding/removing from the buddy and blocked lists wasn’t working.
3. Change: people were complaining about the new “pray” emoticon, that it didn’t look much like prayer, but a lot like begging. Then they begged for the old prayer icon back So, that’s what I did. The old one was restored and the new one was renamed as “beg”.
4. New feature: when you get a new orgnote, you get an email about it, with a link to go read the note directly. This is really cool for me, since I don’t log in to the org religiously, but I do need to keep up on emails. And of course, it’s an option–you can turn it off in the “MY ORG” section, under “Notifications”. (I also cleaned up the preferences slightly, combining the “newsletter” (nonexistent feature), orgNote notifications, and event alerts, all into a single “page” under Notifications.)
5. Also, yesterday, I fixed the “profiles get trashed when editing” bug. Sorry about that one! I fixed something else too at the same time, but can’t recall what exactly.

I hope everyone enjoys the changes and I apologize for any inconvenience the bugs might have caused!

There is a new documentary (info here) about Prince, made by 1xtra (BBC radio, I guess). They are looking for a couple (at least) London-based fans 25 or younger to be interviewed/take part in a discussion Wednesday (TOMORROW). Anyone want to volunteer? Remember, the criteria is:

• Live in London (and be there on Wednesday)
• Under 25
• Prince fan (and hopefully, willing to pimp prince.org on the radio )

If you want to participate, please e-mail me your contact info (name, email, phone number) ASAP to ben@prince.org. Let’s represent! Thanks!

Just wanted to make sure everyone knows about Pete Escovedo’s brand new website. Pete and his family have been friends to prince.org for many years, and I’m actually pretty jazzed (pun intended) about his snazzy new site. A quick perusal, for example, will show you that Sheila E’s dad is not only a super-talented latin jazz musician–scratch that, musician, period–but also an accomplished fine artist (of the painterly sort). I had purchased some painted tiles at one of his concerts in Oakland a few years back, and they’re really great… kind of haunting almost. I’ll have to scan ‘em and put photos up in the gallery once of these days.

Probably the most exciting thing on the site, however, is the info (including how to get tickets) for his 72nd Birthday gig at Yoshi’s. We’ve been to a couple of these in the past and they’re a blast! You will absolutely get your fill of family-friendly, world-class, gotta-get-up-and-dance latin jazz at one of their events. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like we can make it this year, as we’re in the process of moving apartments and taking a quick vacation around that time, but I’ll sneak off if I can. I guarantee it’s worth the trip if you’re anywhere near the Bay Area August  2-5. Even if we can’t go, I’ll try to get some pictures to share in the blog!

You may have noticed some changes to the site tonight, although they’re mostly minor. Mainly, it’s the opening of this ’staff blog’ area, but also I’ve changed all the site URLs to now be just “prince.org” instead of “www.prince.org”. I think if you’re using a web browser it’s pretty obvious you’re on the “world wide web”, and this just makes the URLs shorter, which is nice. The old URLs should all continue to work just fine, however–they are automatically redirected to the new, shorter version.

The search box is also reinstated in the upper-right corner on every page–and it does actually work! It’s powered by Google, and the results aren’t necessarily perfect, but it’s a lot better than nothing. It should improve over time as they index more and more of the site, as well.

Probably slightly less welcome for everyone is the return of advertising. In the forums, there are now Google ads after the first post on each page. I hope they’re not too annoying, and even better, I hope you occasionally find something of interest and give it a click. I didn’t plaster the site with the ads, but it’s an experiment, especially with Prince going on tour again and lots of new visitors coming to the site, for me to see if I can make enough to offset the monthly costs of the site, with ads. I am also cooking up a way for you guys to opt-out of seeing the ads if you so desire (for a small donation), but that isn’t all figured out yet, so just stay tuned to the blog for updates on that.

Update: I have now reproduced the bug that has been reported about the blog section logging you out. That sucks! I’m tracking it down… for now a workaround is to use the “remember me” checkbox when logging in (you can always have it “forget” you by clicking ‘log out’ later). But I will definitely be working on fixing this issue, sorry for the inconvenience!

Update2: I tracked down the bug, and have fixed it. However, it’s possible there may be side effects of generating small bugs elsewhere in the site. I’ll be on the lookout, and do mention weirdness you encounter.

Hi everyone–we’ve decided to add a ‘blog’ section to prince.org, and lo and behold, you’re reading it right now This is a bit of an experiment, but I thought it’d be a useful way for us (the staff) to communicate with everyone about changes on the site, in policy, or other random announcements and items of interest. I am not sure how often we’ll post–I kind of assume, not terribly frequently, but hopefully what we do post will be of interest to everyone and you won’t have to wade through a bunch of topics in the ‘prince.org site forum’ to find it. We might even use this in place of stickies, to some extent, which I’m sure would be welcome by many folks.

So… watch this space for more! And don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed(s) for the blog (there’s also one on the homepage for the latest news,) to stay up-to-date when you’re not visiting prince.org (as if you could ever go a day without that )!