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Grateful Dead Clarify Stand on Live MP3s
Maver1ck writes "Seems things weren't as stange as they
appeared last week. The Grateful Dead will, under strict guidelines
prohibiting commercial use, still allow free MP3 downloads
of live performances taped by fans. They just won't allow banner ads, sales
of user data, sponsorship or any other "profit" from the
exchange. Law firm press release is at PR Newswire.
Still begs the question of paying for all that bandwidth..."
Is it wrong to pay S&H to have a friend mail you a tape?
Or to send him a couple bucks to cover a blank CD-R to have
him burn you a concert? Bandwidth is a bit more expensive
than postage though...
I take exception to CmdrTaco's statement that bandwidth is more expensive then postage. It is far cheaper to send something digitally then to use sailmail. Not only to you have to pay USPS but there is all costs (and time) involved in packaging and creating/copying the media you are sending. You add all the up and you can see that sailmail is very expensive and very inefficient (unless you are sending massive amounts of data concurrently). Do the math... figure out how much effort and money it would take to send out 5000 copies of a Greatful Dead single via sailmail. But then everybody on /. knows that and that is why we have all abandoned using sailmail in favor of sending messages via email and downloading our music via MP3.
/. or mp3.com. But /. and mp3.com are hosting hundreds or thousands of users and so they as a LOT of traffic and hence have huge bandwidth requirements.
The reason that bandwidth seems expensive to CmdrTaco is that he has to pay for all the leaches like me that come and visit his site and use his bandwidth. And he has a lot of leaches - so he needs a lot of bandwidth. The problem isn't one so much of cost of the bandwidth, but instead the economic model that the Internet uses... (i.e. everybody pays for their inbound and outbound bandwidth). That is great for a peon like me with my personal DSL line. I got bandwidth to spare and I can visit, for free, great sites like
And there is the problem, the Internet infrastructure does not allow a consumer of information to easily compensate the distributor of information for the bandwidth used to transport the data off their site. And I'm not sure I want it to be easy... think about what that would lead to.
I used to do a little Phish trading in the past. And generally it IS considered wrong to exchange money in any form, whether it is to cover the costs of media and S&H or not.
;) )
When using the snail mail this is usually handled by one trader sending the other blank media and return package with the postage already paid.
This method covers everything but time and resources withouth any money being exchange, but time and resources simply can't be compensated for.
I think this is pretty fair. I think the bands that allow taping of there live shows are doing a very cool thing for the fans. But, I don't believe anybody should profit off those recordings unless the band is getting a piece of the action.
Bands generally benefit from tape trading - especially smaller/lesser-known bands, b/c the tapes allow a wider audience. I think the internet could increase this benefit by orders of magnitude.
The problem of course being paying for the bandwidth.. I wish I had a solution, but I don't. The bands that could afford to distribute their live shows themselves off there site, would be large enough that they wouldn't need the exposure. And, the small bands probably couldn't afford to do it themselves. Fans will do it, but as this GD has pointed out, the have to do it without any financial gains.
(sorry, that turned in to a rant - and sorry about the AC posting - I'm at work, and don't remember my password
Look at it this way-- before mp3s and the internet, cassette tapes and the parking lot outside concerts served much the same function. This is simply extending the same rules to new media. And I would imagine that it's perfectly all right to ask people to pay for shipping or the cost of the CD-R, since you're still not making a profit off the transaction.
I think that the Grateful Dead were pretty revolutionary in their treatment of "bootlegging". Instead of considering it a loss of revenue, they called it free promotion. If only Fox would do the same thing with Simpsons fan sites!
Causation can cause correlation
This is good, at least they have a solid policy in writing. Speaking for myself as an avid trader I would never dream of going to a format which is less accurate than CD-R/DAT for trading, and there are many studio quality recordings out there with no generational degradation (love digital trading)... and CD-R's are cheap... but having MP3's will be nice for downloading and previewing stuff. I think most of the hard-core traders don't care much about MP-3 unless it gets beyond the "better than cassette but not as good as CD" level of quality.
I wonder if the band will have the same policy for good ol' PCM. You can squish a full CD-R to about 300 MB with shorten (roughly the wav equivelant of gzip). With cable modems/xDSL getting cheaper fully lossless online digital trading is becoming more of a reality, 'cept when everyone else on your subnet is doing the same thing and you're getting modem-fast transfer speeds.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
First, my comments make the assumption that the site(s) in question provide mp3s for download legally, a la mp3.com. Since warez sites follow a different philosophy, my comments don't really apply to them.
Reading the document it isn't really clear to me if this is allowed or not, but couldn't sites which have banner advertising simply have no banners on the pages where Dead mp3's are downloaded from. In other words, folks going to download other mp3's would see ads, as would those seeing the main page with, say, the letter indexes ("Bands whose names start with A", "B", "C", etc.), but once on the "grateful dead" page no advertising would appear. This might allow sites to pay for bandwidth, but still be in keeping with the spirit of what the Grateful Dead are trying to achieve.
Of course, then there's the ethical issue of whether Grateful Dead trading should be subsidized by the work and efforts of other bands who are, after all, competitors in a sense, which is what is arguably happening if banner ads to pay for the sites are viewed when downloading their material.
For what its worth, I agree with the philosophy the Dead are trying to promote -- I'm just wondering if there isn't an economical compromize that would be in keeping with their requirements, yet allow sites to continue to finance their existence.
comments? other ideas?
jean
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
>what is to stop someone from buying bulk postage >& blanks and making profit?
Nothing really, though if it gets out on r.m.gd, you get lots of flames and presumably it's harder to get nice tapes from 'heads with huge collections who buy into the no profit thing.
Curiously though, people selling off analogs for about $2.00 a piece (usually upgrading to DAT) get far fewer flames, $2 being the apparent marker price for blanks and postage.
George