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.