It’s all about the copyright, with Prince saying YouTube’s standard argument that it cannot control what people upload isn’t exactly true.

“YouTube … are clearly able [to] filter porn and pedophile material but appear to choose not to filter out the unauthorized music and film content which is core to their business success,” said a statement issued on Prince’s behalf.

YouTube isn’t the only target of Prince’s ire. His Funkiness also vented against eBay and The Pirate Bay torrent site, and hired an intellectual property security company, Web Sheriff, to help lead the charge up digital piracy hill.

To be sure, each site targeted by Prince has its own copyright problems. YouTube says it complies with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by removing copyrighted material as soon as it is notified by content owners. Of course, that doesn’t stop others from re-uploading copyrighted material after its initial removal by YouTube management.

Web Sheriff’s managing director pretty much summed up YouTube’s situation, saying that no matter how many videos are removed, new problems always surface the next day.

“In the last couple of weeks we have directly removed approximately 2,000 Prince videos from YouTube,” said Web Sheriff’s John Giacobbi. “The problem is that one can reduce it to zero and then the next day there will be 100 or 500 or whatever. This carries on ad nauseam at Prince’s expense.”

Prince’s problem with eBay is a different matter and consists mostly of unauthorized merch such as key rings and coffee mugs appearing on the auction Web site.

Then there’s The Pirate Bay, which doesn’t actually host illicit content. Instead, The Pirate Bay is a torrent site. Such sites provide users with bits of code directing torrent-based file-sharing software to computers on the Net hosting files.

But The Pirate Bay isn’t the only torrent site on the Net. If Prince wants to remove his music from the torrent-based file-sharing community, he’s going to have to launch a legal broadside at more than just The Pirate Bay. The sheer number of torrent sites on the Web should be enough to make any intellectual property owner scream, “Aaarrrgh!“