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Steal
Your Tapes
Things
are not so kosher in Deadhead land these days. Years ago,
the Grateful Dead embarked on a bold, trust-based journey
with their innumerable fans: The band allowed the taping of
their live concerts and the trading of live tapes. So long
as the trading was noncommercial, fans could do pretty much
what they wanted with these recordings. Part hippie ideology,
part brilliant marketing strategy, the encouragement of fan
taping was one of many aspects of Dead-dom that built a sense
of community, of family, and of a collective renegade spirit—real
or not, there has always been this sense that there were no
barriers between the music and the people. Once the music
was in the air, it belonged to everyone. The Dead also established
the gold standard of music trading, followed by countless
musicians everywhere. Take a look at über-site archive.org
(actually you can spend a lifetime there): There are tens
of thousands of live recordings up for download, all there
with the explicit permission of the artists.
All of this came crashing down last week when archive.org
suddenly announced that Grateful Dead management had asked
it to pull all Dead recordings off of its site, where they
had been available for free download for years. Within hours,
there were petitions whizzing around the net calling for a
boycott of the Dead and its official merchandise. Dead bassist
Phil Lesh posted a message on his Web site that he’d been
blindsided by the announcement. Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow,
who uses the Dead ethos as a bulwark of his groundbreaking
work in the “free culture” movement (Barlow is also co-founder
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation), was simply beside
himself. He told BoingBoing.com:
“You
have no idea how sad I am about this. I fought it hammer and
tong, but the drummers had inoperable bricks in their head
about it. What’s worse is that they now want to remove all
Dead music from the Web. They might as easily put a teaspoon
of food coloring in a swimming pool and then tell the pool
owner to get it back to them. It’s like finding out that your
brother is a child molester. And then, worse, having everyone
then assume that you’re a child molester too. I’ve been called
a hypocrite in three languages already. How magnificently
counter-productive of them. It’s as if the goose who laid
the golden egg had decided to commit suicide so that he could
get more golden eggs. This is just the beginning of the backlash,
I promise you. This is worse than the RIAA suing their customers.”
Within days, a détente of sorts was reached. Archive.org issued
a diplomatic apology, implying that it had misread the Dead’s
intent, and stating that fan-taped concerts would be put back
up for download. Soundboard-fed recordings, however, would
be available only for streaming, which means these recordings
can be listened to off of the site, but not automatically
downloaded. (Streams can be readily captured and stored with
the right software; this is another one of those ask-a-13-year-old-boy
deals, and it’s fairly easy to do, I’m told).
The Dead management has been cleaning up soundboard feeds
of shows and selling them on the official Dead website, and
this compromise solution protects those “properties” while
keeping intact, sort of, the utopian vision of fan-generated
freely available concert recordings. A good argument can be
made that soundboard feeds are the Dead’s property, like their
studio recordings, and not “music in the air” that, mingling
with the arc trails of hacky-sacks and the pungent aroma of
patchoulie, belong to The People. Nonetheless, the whole episode
caused a stain that’s not going to wash off anytime soon.
Actually, what the Dead did was neither unprecedented nor
irrational. Phish, Dave Matthews, and Widespread Panic long
ago pulled all recordings, including fan-recorded shows, off
of Archive.net, for the simple reason that the site didn’t
foster community, sharing, or any of the other touchy-feely
positives that were the reason for allowing fan taping to
begin with. The site was simply a place to get stuff for free.
Such is the nature of digital media. It’s mobile, it’s small,
and it moves around fast when it’s something people want.
Try to control it. You can’t. The Internet represents a sea
change in the information paradigm from when the Dead instituted
its tape-trading policy so many years ago. And the Dead, as
standard bearers for this whole brave new world, can’t possibly
pretend that they can change what the world has become, like
it or not. As I’ve said before, the cat’s rolling around in
the toothpaste, and you won’t get the toothpaste off the cat
and back into the tube, nor will you ever get the cat back
in the bag.
—Paul
Rapp
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