The Legend of Prince’s Special Custom-Font Symbol Floppy Disks | Hacker News Reader

The Legend of Prince’s Special Custom-Font Symbol Floppy Disks

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91 pointstintinnabula18 comments

For those who don't know, Prince legally changed his name to a made-up unpronounceable symbol in the early 90's to sidestep restrictions in the contract he had signed with his record company, Warner, which at the time had the rights to use the name "Prince" for music and merchandise.

After the legal name change, news outlets started calling him "the artist formerly known as Prince." Meanwhile, Warner had no rights to the new, unpronounceable name. Warner executives likely were not too happy about that, but couldn't do anything about it.

In 2000, after the contract with Warner expired, Prince went back to using his old name.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36107590

I knew about the name change but not the reason. I had always chalked it up to hubris on his part. Thanks :)

Is the part about him legally changing his name really true? All the sources say so, but surely there are laws and regulations around name changes in the US. I have a hard time imagining the IRS having him down as the symbol.

Also, changing your name can't be a legal way of getting out of contracts, can it? If it is, then someone should let Ke$ha know...

I've heard several different reasonings over the years. I don't think it actual got him out of a contract but it allowed him to screw the record company. His new 'name' was difficult to market and they had the rights to the 'Prince' name, not his new one, so any new merchandise they created would not be matching the name he was now marketing himself under. Fans are going to listen to him and not the record company. So all in all he was just screwing them out of money and making their job difficult but it didn't actually end any contract.

Looking at the discography and discussion on the Wikipedia artivle, I don't think the name change got him out of his contract. It seems that he had to release a certain number of albums to finish his contract. I think by using the symbol on those albums, he prevented Warner brothers from having rights to use his name in connection with it. He probably negotiated his next contract a bit differently.

What he did was start turning the crank, churning out five albums in three years, since the contract stipulates a certain number of albums to be produced. Which leads one to wonder if he didn't want the Prince "branding" applied to this work; maybe he thought the label was meddling too much and it wasn't really his work?

svantana: for the purpose of Warner enforcing its contract with Prince, he legally changed his stage name, i.e., the name of his act.

I remember when Prince did that soon after Weird Al Yankovic said he was going to legally change his name to Prince but Prince said no.

He also performed with "Slave" painted across his face/chest. He REALLY didn't like his treatment by the studio.

Ha! You type "P" for the symbol-- so he doesn't have his own Unicode codepoint?

The font may have an ambiguous license, but it appears that it was meant to be widely distributed to promote Prince. Is it available anywhere? I could make my own, but that wouldn't be the same.

Here you go - converted to TTF and downloadable: http://www.dailydot.com/technology/prince-font-install-love-...

(straight to dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jvj2ss4jfymvir1/AAD_x2sTAfJM8xsgF...)

Yea I found a article about the font and how they recovered the original. http://www.dailydot.com/technology/prince-font-install-love-...

No, he doesn't, and it's a crying shame. Contact your local Unicode consortium representative - If and 𒀽 deserve Unicode codepoints, the artist formerly known as Prince surely does too.

To propose this character to the UTC (Unicode Technical Committee) you'll need to include as many examples as possible showing the symbol used in running text. Physical objects and logos won't do; you need to show historical use of the symbol in running text (newspaper or magazine articles, books, liner notes, et cetera). Find examples, and we could make the proposal.

We've done it before on HN:

https://github.com/jloughry/Unicode/#readme

Unicode tends to resist adding symbols for specific people, companies, or brands. They'll say to put it in the private use area.

You're right, and IIRC this symbol has been proposed before unsuccessfully. But recent events have called to attention the backstory behind Prince's symbol---how it was created for use as a tool to modify an unfair contract, and how that successful hack opened up the recording industry for artists---many articles were printed about it at the time (most of them missing the point), a few books were written since, lots more articles were published about it last week, and likely more books about Prince are being written now.

A code point is needed for Prince's symbol now. It's no longer merely pop culture but history and law.

Eh. As much as we like Prince, his symbol is still a brand, and Unicode should not be a permanent memorial to brands.

And here's why excluding people is nice: I'd say there's history involved in the fact that the North Korean encoding (KPS 9566) has codepoints for special decorative characters for writing "Kim Jong-Il", but Unicode isn't putting those in either.

After all, could any other artist convince a major music publication to integrate a custom font?

“How many people can just say ‘Hey, I’m changing my name to this symbol so can you use it from now on?’ and everyone’s like ‘Alright. Okay. No questions asked. You’re Prince! We’ll do it!’ It was kind of funny to me.”

Then again, music journalism is probably a business where they are accustomed to seeing all kinds of diva behavior.

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