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The simple, obvious solution is to convince deadheads that these tapes contain live recordings of the Grateful Dead on them. They will find a way not only to extract and digitize this information (if necessary) they will also track its lineage, archive it and spread it so that many backups exist.

The simple, obvious solution is to convince deadheads that these tapes contain live recordings of the Grateful Dead on them. They will find a way not only to extract and digitize this information (if necessary) they will also track its lineage, archive it and spread it so that many backups exist.

There is a sizable community which legitimately records concerts, with consent from the band (encouragement even), and shares them with the world. example: http://bt.etree.org/ is all bittorrent. https://archive.org/details/et... allows direct download of MP3's, but if you want a 1gb set of flac files, they encourage use of bittorrent.

I'm sure these asshats would send a cease and desist order to that website accusing them of pirating their own music.

I have but one suggestion for music distribution: this.

Here's where I get 90% of my music (the other 10% I actually go to shows). Requires a Torrent client plus Monkeys Audio, libFLAC and Shorten codecs but that's no biggy - the links are there...

I was looking at my 2TB drive wondering where to start with that mess, let alone my 1TB with just Live Dead and Phish shows..

Why would you need to worry about the Dead and Phish stuff? It's all legally tradeable unless you were dl'ing ripped Dick's Pick and stuff from Phish Dry Goods!

The way to verify the shows would be: checking that the show folders and files conform to Etree naming standards, the presence of the info text file and MD5 checksum file or searching the Etree database or Archive.org for that show source. To date, the only downloads that I have seen that don't meet those criteria are the Grateful Dead complete SBD download torrents by year. If it was a case of getting stuff that was ripped from someone's collection, you can do individual file comparisons against known sources to determine which source a show probably came from, track times are usually a giveaway since it's rare that different sources get cut at the same place...

The most efficient model for consistent music distribution has been the one used by Etree.org/Archive.org. Each live show source was transferred, encoded and seeded with the MD5's generated at the time of encoding, earliest shows were done in SHN and later it was shifted to FLAC. A new show source was considered the equivalent of a Gold Master Disc and it was entered in a database at Etree.org. All subsequent copies of the SHN's and FLAC's were expected to check against those MD5's and if they failed they were considered bad and discarded so that they wouldn't get seeded in the future. It didn't matter what transport method was used for transferring the files, all that counted was that the files were bit perfect copies of the originals.

For example, here is a show I transferred and seeded in 2000

If you were to obtain a copy of those SHN files today, and you verified the MD5's, you know you have an exact copy of the files as they were encoded A DECADE AGO. Now if I were to transfer the master cd's again and encode it, the MD5's would not match, no matter how paranoid an attempt at DAE was made (this was proven back then for all digital transfers INCLUDING DAT>WAV) If you looked across the different formats available, even after 10 years there are still only 4 unique variants in the wild in spite of the show being copied by more than 5000 people. Those 4 variants are only a single format conversion removed from the initial transfer in 2000.

But this was a system that was conceived to preserve the audit trail and file integrity. The issue of legality was not a problem since the bands have given permission to allow for taping and trading of their shows.

Isn't the fact that it's "good, free, and open" the exact reasons the publishers wouldn't use it?

Depends on the band. For instance, I haven't bought a CD version of a studio release from Gov't Mule in quite some time. They offer MP3 and FLAC for purchase right on their own website.

Phish even sells what they call "FLAC-HD" versions. These are 24 bit/96 KHz versions of their live shows.

Not to mention, these, and hundreds of other, bands allow people to tape and distribute copies of their live shows. Those recordings are FLAC as well, often higher than CD quality.

We are supposed to believe the analysis of a biased entity over professional researchers?

When the professional researchers conclude that "Music, movies and TV shows constituted the three largest categories of shared materials, and among those, zero legal files were found", we have to conclude that they didn't do a very good job, because there are at least two sites (Jamendo and Etree) which allow nothing but legal music files, and both have tracked the exchange of many petabytes of data. (There are many more sites which limit themselves to legal material, but not to music--or TV or movies.)

If I were to do an analysis of FTP, and then deliberately limited my study to "pirate" sites, I would come up with a hopelessly biased sample and useless numbers. It may well be that the legal torrent sites are statistically insignificant, but if they didn't study them, how can they conclude that? Assuming that they are is basically assuming your conclusion. It begs the question.

I agree with your assessment of TorrentFreak, but a lack of credentials and credibility in a critic does not make a study legitimate.

My favorite tracker is 100% non-infringing music. In fact, BitTorrent was created in part to satisfy the needs of hippie concert tapers/traders. It didn't take long for BitTorrent to completely kill off use of FTP by Etree users.

https://miroguide.com/
http://www.jamendo.com/
http://bt.etree.org/

Heavy users of Bittorrent, and legal.

archive.org's Live Music Archive or http://bt.etree.org should get you where you need to go.

There's bt.etree.org, which shares live concert recordings of taper-friendly bands, and which tracks the shifting of petabytes each year. (It is, IMO, a much more useful site if you click on the "hide Grateful Dead and Phish" button at the bottom of the page, but opinions may vary.) There's also legaltorrents.com which specializes in creative-commons media. Neither one is going to have as much mainstream material as the illegal sites (that should go without saying), but etree, at least, has some fairly big names, e.g. Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Buckethead, JJ Cale, Los Lobos, Primus.

I only see *large, traditional* music in decline, and organizations built on the assumption those organizations are the only ones with talent - but not the "industry". Such is the effect of rapid change.

See collections, for example:
http://www.jamendo.com/en/
http://bt.etree.org/
http://beta.legaltorrents.com/netlabel-music
http://uaradio.net/

and others, going strong and growing

plus *lots* of great, independent net labels and organizations building up to use the Internet the way it works, and an emerging set of well-known artists breaking free from these old organizations to embrace new methods.

Legal Torrents:
http://www.jamendo.com/ -CC music
http://bt.etree.org/ -Live music archive
http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/ -Fan made movies (allowed by trademark owners)
http://www.getmiro.com/ -Free video downloader/player with Free content.
http://azureuswiki.com/index.php/Legal_torrent_sites -List of many more

Plenty of Legal uses for the technology.

Yeah, and over here are over 60,000 complete concert recordings which likewise are not illegal. And over here is what is almost certainly the largest legal/free torrent tracker in the world, with thousands more. I think they reported tracking the movement of over an exobyte in their first year (before they got big).

A possible solution is to start seeding masses of innocent data so that they simply cannot identify the music sharers from anyone else.

You're assuming that the "music sharers" are copyright violators. In fact, over at Etree, they're already sharing terabytes of perfectly legal music, much of it from fairly big names that happen to allow taping/trading (the rest is from small obscure bands that also allow taping/trading). Etree is probably the largest single fully-legal torrent site in the world. Jon Hart, who is famously suing Comcast for their interference with his torrents is the main west-coast taper for one of the taper-friendly bands, and Etree is where he ran them.

Your idea of seeding random data is interesting, but I think it's going to be hard to get more than a tiny number of people to participate. Etree, on the other hand, already has huge amounts of data, and, while it's dominated by hippie jam-band junk that most people won't be interested in, it has enough other styles of music there that a whole lot of people can probably find something of interest (and you can filter out the grateful dead and phish--I have the already-filtered page bookmarked). So if you want to help drive up the amount of legal torrent traffic in the world, looking for something that might interest you on Etree is probably a good place to start.

(Note that many of the bands which allow taping and trading do so only under non-commercial terms, so Etree is, of necessity, completely ad-free.)

Don't forget http://bt.etree.org/, the largest legal live lossless music tracker on the Internet.

OK, here we go...

step one: blocking...

make some ACLs and throw them on your firewall to block the most-used bittorrent, emule, etc. ports. You are now taking steps to block p2p traffic.

step two: provide a legal alternative

I've got your compliance right here!

DMB just gets shit cause he's commercial, which is kind of antithetical to the exploratory nature of jam, nothing personal. But as for the good stuff I'm sure you don't need me to mention the Grateful Dead and Phish. Others include the String Cheese Incident, Umphrey's McGee, Yonder Mountain String Band, and the Steve Kimock Band. There's a lot more where that came from too.

And there is a large community of people who trade live music which is completely legal for many bands. I know I have well over 100GB of live (legal) shows and my collection pales in comparison to many others. I don't doubt that a lot of piracy occurs but when you exaggerate, you lose credibility.

...and so its distribution is often allowed for little or no $$ required of the end-user. One favorite source is NPR's concert podcast.

Many artists (or maybe more accurately, their record co. people) will allow fans to make ambient recordings of concerts and put them online. These vary in quality, but a good find can be a treasure. Some sites intend to provide only material an artist/label/venue allows to be recorded, and remove material an artist's reps complain about. It's caveat emptor in terms of legality, but this kind of distribution doesn't appear intently targeted by the legal eagles (who have a better case against someone if they can demonstrate a financial loss from trading recordings they're already attempting to sell). Etree is a favorite.

But most listeners don't really have a taste for the FOB-AUD stuff. Most listeners prefer multitrack recorded, post session mixed, with any flubs patched. Thats the vast majority of the music that gets traded on thepiratebay and demonoid (RIP). That's the business that's circling the drain as we watch.

With the death of the RIAA music business, I do sorta wonder how bands will rise to national and international prominence. I'm not saying there will never be rock stars again, but I do wonder what the mechanism will be. I'm well awasre that the RIAA music business ripped off Janice Ian and Roger McGuinn (scroll past Lars) and most other not-quite-superstar musicians. But I honestly wonder: without the RIAA based music business, would we ever have heard of Buddy Holly or the Byrds? Would there have been a national pool where talent could rise to the top?

Now I'm not saying that still happens. According to David Crosby the tides in the talent pool have been pulling all wrong for a long time. I'm not even saying that the RIAA based dinosaurs don't deserve to die. What I am saying is that for 60 or more years, the music industry has maintained a sort of cultural commons -- has provided a meaningful soundtrack for each generation from WWII on -- so that people from far away could join together with shared music. And I'm not trying to be snarky; I truly wonder, when (not if) the RIAA based music industry dies, what will fill in this cultural commons?

From article: "Until updates are made available, users should only play FLAC files from trusted sources. To date, however, FLAC files are rarely seen in the wild."

Ironic since I read this article while listening to a just downloaded Devo show in flac format. Considering the number of live music torrent sites ( e.g. archive.org,trader's den, etree , and dime a dozen) that mostly offer FLAC I am surprised by the statement. I also would think that people wanting lossless quality audio will be checking their hashes anyways for audio integrity and it won't be a problem. There is also a difference in leaching an album in FLAC off a torrent site and audiophiles listening to live music, the former would be inclined to listen to mp3 rips anyways. Good to know, but the security implications seem a stretch.

actually i take that back, fuck the album, get this show,

http://bt.etree.org/details.php?id=26458

Also many Free and Open Source software projects distribute installers via BitTorrent, notably Ubuntu Linux and OpenOffice.org.

All of these torrents are completely legal. Yet many ISPs block BitTorrent traffic - that happened to me with Eastlink back in Nova Scotia. I was therefore unable to check that my own torrents were operating properly! One can try to work around such blockage by using non-standard port numbers, but I understand that it's possible for ISPs to filter based on the content of packets, and not just the port numbers.

I can see the day coming when all peer-to-peer traffic, whether legal or not, is blocked either due to new laws or record and movie industry lawsuits. All of us who have free content and software to distribute will lose out.

Those of us who offer legal files via peer-to-peer networks - not just BitTorrent, as Jamendo also offers eMule - need to work together to lobby both national governments and local ISPs to do away with this filtering. There are many ways to download both music and software that are perfectly legal; we need to dispel the myth that free downloads are somehow necessarily violating the law.

I dunno about video, but try the etree forums or the Live Music Archive. There are lots of experienced concert tapers there, and they love talking gear.

If you do tape any shows, be sure to seed them on bt.etree.org. Thanks!

I think I will have to stick with Spotlight due to my overwhelming reliance on importers such as these. Being able to search through flac tags can be really helpful if you archive hundreds and hundreds of GBs of live music, which generally have strange naming conventions (or at least less imformative ones).

a far better site for music is here at least there are "names"

http://bt.etree.org/
It's a start.

The bands explicitly say the stuff is:

http://wiki.etree.org/index.php?page=TradeFriendly

And the recordings of their shows are up on etree for free too. sweet radiohead show http://bt.etree.org/download.php/26389/rh2006-06-1 7flac16.torrent

99% of the legitimate 99% is music. Its just legal http://bt.etree.org/ and http://www.archive.org/audio for starts.

How do you know that the independent music that you download is lawful? Heck, how do even the bands know that their music is lawful, given the subconscious copying doctrine?

"Oh, and 99% of the legitimate 99% is music. Its just legal http://bt.etree.org/ and http://www.archive.org/audio for starts."

Good thing we have Piratebay to keep them free.

Yeah, I'm relatively sure that 99% of torrent download ARE legitimate things like linux distros..

99% of the torrents I download are legitimate things. Those that aren't are usually software that I want to try and then don't use because they are inferior to freely available alternatives.

Oh, and 99% of the legitimate 99% is music. Its just legal http://bt.etree.org/ and http://www.archive.org/audio for starts.

Your comments make me think of what the future holds for artists. I think you're definitely right in stating that the number of artists that can be supported will fall. Touring/live performances will have to be the big money maker for most artists if the industry is forced to come to terms with virtually free reproduction of their goods. And there are not too many artists with enough talent (musical or performing) to sell enough tickets to turn a consistent profit.

As has been pointed out here on /. before, this model has worked for a number of groups in the past; the Grateful Dead and Phish are probably the best known examples. If you go to etree you can see that a number of bands are giving away their music, often as high-quality soundboard recordings. And they're still out there making music and money.

One key ingredient the profitibility of most of these bands is the same thing that is making open source software successful: community. Many of the fans that attend concerts and trade recordings also buy practically anything the band puts out. Many of them are willing to pay for official releases of concerts they already have to support the band.

The communities around these bands/artists are not usually large enough to drive albums to multi-platinum status, but they are loyal. That's probably more than can be said about people who buy the latest flavor-of-the-month studio album.

Another cool site is Etree.org, which has lossless recordings of live shows. These are all in the clear, as they are all recordings of artists and bands that allow recording of their shows.

Legal music baby.. And other cool stuff.

http://archive.org/

http://bt.etree.org/

RIAA sux. Have fun.

Also also, there are ways to get free music, legally. Places like etree.org host tons of recordings from trade-friendly artists. The Creative Commons site has a page that links to some places to get music, including SoundClick, a site very reminiscent of the old, good mp3.com.

FYI - They DO ALLOW their bootlegs to be freely downloaded via bittorrent! See: http://bt.etree.org/index.php?cat=137

http://bt.etree.org/ is a hub for several well known bands offering their live shows for free download. Bands include Phish, Widespread Panic, Grateful Dead, etc. All bands have policies stating their intentions for sharing the music including specific provisions (such as no soundboard copies in the case of the Grateful Dead).

I like ETree for all my music needs. http://bt.etree.org/ is a free tracker for free music. The bands, who's music appears on this site, allow and encourage people to make tapes of their live shows and share them with their friends. It is this general philosophy that lead to the large followings of The Greatful Dead and Phish and Linux.

http://www.legaltorrents.com

ETree - Legal Bootleg Torrents

Open Source Torrents

And you know what we're filling them with? Some of the most popular bands among my friends have been The Arcade Fire, Death From Above 1979, Controller Controllor, Broken Social Scene, Hawksley Workman, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Jimmy Swift Band, Matt Mays, and countless others. Many of them allow their live shows to be traded on etree.

You want to know why these groups are popular? They tour a lot, play a lot of gigs, put on great live shows and are overall in it for the music and the fans. We've identified with the artists that put the music before the money and appreciate the innovative sounds and artistic views that they bring.

The true Canadian music scene is alive and prospering already without the help of the major music labels, with or without all their evil tactics. Anyway, at the very least, just check out these bands!

A lot of recordings made at concerts of trade-friendly artists are being done with Creative's Nomad Jukebox Zen, which yields excellent audio quality. These recordings are then posted online in FLAC format, and sound quite impressive. Check out http://bt.etree.org/ to download and find out for yourself.

But, the vast majority of people don't have distribution rights for any of the music on their iPods.

You know - you don't have to be an audio engineer to get more then enough freely redistributable music to fill your iPod many times over.

If Apple were more interested in helping their customers, and less interested in helping RIAA / etc out, archive.org (at least) would be prominently featured in itunes.

As things stand they're not interested in promoting any msuic they can't make a few dollars on (even where it would not cost them anything and benefit their customers).

Indeed, and from my observations (mainly on bt.etree.org, which has legally downloadable music and only legally downloadable music), the two most popular clients are Azureus and BitTornado, not necessarily in that order. I don't know if there's something about live music fans (or jam-band fans) that makes them more likely to choose BitTornado, but it seems unlikely. So, by snubbing BitTornado, they not only snubbed my favorite (which I'm used to), but, apparently, one of the most popular clients out there.

BTW, I'm currently offering the New Orleans Radiators' New Years Eve show; anyone who likes (or thinks they might like) some New-Orleans-flavored classic-rock/swamp-pop should check it out here. These guys aren't exactly the RIAA's darlings--they're no pretty-boy pop-stars--but they've been one of America's best party bands for over a quarter of a century, and show no signs of slowing down. And they strongly support their fans' rights to tape and trade their concerts.

Just to satisfy my own curiousity: if you've got a CD collection and access to a computer. . . what's stopping you?

Hundreds of gigs of http://bt.etree.org/browse.php and http://www.archive.org/audio/etreelisting-browse.p hp and others :)

If they don't have it archive try bt.etree.org, The Traders Den or FurthurNET. You may even get to talk to some cool chicks or hoopy froods... :-)

FWIW, I've (ab)used a variety of CD-Rs in my car CD player, subjected to extremes of heat and cold, and found that both the Imations and the TY Fujis have held up well. Scratches have caused me more trouble than environmental conditions.

IMHO, it's always a good thing when artists decide to cut out the middle man and let the music sell itself over the web. However, as many have already noted, this is hardly unique to Harvy Danger. I suggest checking out http://bt.etree.org/ for a lot more great trade-friendly artists. They have a good variety with bands such as the Black Crowes, the Grateful Dead, Dave Matthews Band, Phish, and Gwar.

Again, this is a good thing that Harvy Danger is doing. It just makes me wonder why it took them so long (Maybe they had to wait for a contract to expire or something), other than the fact that they haven't had a hit in years and are probably desparate.