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The Grateful Dead vs. Archive.org
An anonymous reader writes "E! Online has an article about friction between archive.org and the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. They have come to an amicable understanding after some confusion involving online bootlegs." From the article: "A week after some of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead ordered a nonprofit site to remove free downloads of the seminal jam band's concerts--sparking massive online backlash and a Deadhead petition calling for a boycott of all band-related merchandise--the band has reversed its position. 'The Grateful Dead remains as it always has--in favor of tape trading,' spokesman Dennis McNally tells the Associated Press. "
Fans pissed off at the merchanise type people put up a petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/. Theirs is one of the largest petitions on the site.
From boingboing (where I saw this initially) comes the following:
He said the band consented to making audience recordings available for download again, although live recordings made directly from concert soundboards, which are the legal property of the Grateful Dead, should only be made available for listening from now on.
They are not reopening it back up fully. They are removing something which was granted to them earlier.
liqbase
John Perry Barlow (lyricist, but he has other claims to fame outside the Dead) was not happy. In this story he blames it on the drummers (Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann). The NYT quoted him as having had a "pretty heated discussion" with Weir, guitarist and his songwriting partner. Robert Hunter (Jerry Garcia's lyricist) was reportedly not happy either but is silent.
I'm just disappointed, that's all.
Bob Weir, Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann were greedy because they felt the 50,000,000 per year that the band earned while Jerry Garcia was alive just wasn't enough to retire on. They threw a tantrum. Archive.org attempted to do what they though the Dead wanted and removed all the music.
John Perry Barlow, Phil Lesh and others disagreed, holding true to Garcia's attitude about trading. Live-recorded music (by fans) is restored to Archive.org; studio recordings are not.
Deadheads are freaking out and suffering from disillusionment. The question of whether the more pristine studio recordings should be allowed is not yet answered.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
Many of our federal drug laws were founded on discrimination and collusion with the medical boards and prescription narcotic companies. I've researched the enumerated federal powers and nowhere in the Constitution do I see any allotment for the Congress to control, regulate, criminalize or even define drug use. The 9th and 10th Amendments are very clear that the right to use drugs is protected and within the individual States or the People to control.
Illinois could criminalize drugs, but the federal government absolutely cannot. The use of force by the feds to criminalize non-violent drug use is treason and worthy of the ultimate penalty for those enforcing these unconstitutional laws.
I do not use drugs of any kind, FWIW.
"once we're done with [the music], you can have it." - Jerry Garcia= 49496
y -garcia.jpg
Bassist Phil Lesh echoed that sentiment--quoting Garcia in an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS's 60 Minutes in 2004: "Jerry put it the best, as he frequently did, 'Let 'em have it. When we play it, we're done with it."
from: http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id
The Dead also released a disclaimer about their live music:
MP3 STATEMENT TO MP3 SITE OPERATORS
The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members. That a new medium of distribution has arisen - digital audio files being traded over the Internet - does not change our policy in this regard.
Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follows:
No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means.
All participants in such digital exchange acknowledge and respect the copyrights of the performers, writers and publishers of the music.
This notice should be clearly posted on all sites engaged in this activity.
We reserve the ability to withdraw our sanction of non-commercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.
Jerry Garcia did not care about people taping or downloading their music, he thought any live show could be shared and traded by anyone for their personal use, but not to copy and sell for profit. I would think the rest of the band would respect his wishes. Long live Jerry.
http://www.people4peace.net/pix/people4peace/jerr
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Physical objects are all that property is about: your body, your car, your land, your house. I don't see how anything non-physical can be considered property. The short term monopoly encourages manipulation of the power that forces that monopoly, it does not encourage creation.
t m
As for the PCM data recorder on VHS, the hardware to extract it will not be cheap. I messed with these devices in the 80s as a cheap data backup for the PC:
http://www.merlineng.com/ME-981_991.html
http://www.gracey.com/descriptions/teac-5000-d1.h
Not true, the Dead never said anything about trading recordings of their shows, that was still kosher. What they yanked was the ability to go to a single resource, archive.org, and download a copy. bt's were still viable, as were regular old snail-mail trades/B&P's. Now, to the best of my knowledge, you can still trade the sbd's, you just can't download from archive.
It's not really that big a deal since there are plenty of bands that allow taping but don't allow their shows to be hosted on archive.org (phish, DMB, ABB to name a few).
-samI was just here, where did I go?
The recordings that are no longer available were lossless. The streams are lossy.
Yes. It turned out Copyright hadn't been renewed (and that was a requirement at the time), so it had been public domain since the 1970's.
The taping of the shows was a carryover from the ideal days of the late 60's. "Hey we are just here making music, if you want to sit in front with a tape recorder that's cool with us."
The taping of concerts is a tradition Jerry picked up from his days as a bluegrass musician. You may not know it, but Jerry started out on the banjo, and was rather good at it too. What the internet did for the grateful dead's boots, it also did for these old bluegrass tapes. Check out Bluegrassbox and The Steam Powered Preservation Society.
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