Prince banning Prince covers would rob us of these three awesome videos

Notorious control freak/undeniable genius Prince just told George Lopez that he wishes copyright law would prevent other musicians from covering his songs. (This via The AV Club; we forgot to DVR yesterday's Lopez Tonight somehow.)

This, of course, is a guy who successfully sued a toddler to remove a YouTube video of the kid dancing to "Let's Go Crazy." And, as Sean O'Neal at The AV Club points out, Prince covers others people's stuff constantly, often in virtuosic medleys of several at a time. His 2007 Super Bowl performance, for example, included snippets of "Proud Mary," "All Along the Watchtower," and the Foo Fighters' "Best of You." (This last was supposedly a bizarre act of revenge against the Foo Fighters for themselves covering "Darling Nikki" without his permission; apparently Dave Grohl was for some reason delighted to have one of the greatest performers of all time cover his song in front of ninety-million viewers, so that dish may not have been served as cold as Chef Prince was hoping.)

Anyway, Prince often feels that rules should apply to everyone except Prince, but it's a good thing he's not really in charge on this one, because we'd lose some awesome covers, like these three:

1) Janelle Monae covering "Let's Go Crazy"

2) The Replacements covering "I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man" (or at least the music; characteristically, they didn't bother to learn the words)

3) Cyndi Lauper covering "When You Were Mine"