Grateful Dead Statement on MP3s

I think I should post this somewhere on the blog. Hopefully this will be as good a spot as any :)


STATEMENT TO MP3 SITE OPERATORS


The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely noncommercial 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 follow:

• 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 noncommercial digital music should circumstances arise that compromise our ability to protect and steward the integrity of our work.