There was a great deal of anguish this week when it appeared that the Grateful Dead had asked archive.org to remove all dead shows from its download list, allowing shows only to be streamed. Then, it turned out that it was a miscommunication: the Dead asked that they stop letting folks download copies of tapes from the soundboard, but keep allowing them to download tapes made by folks in the audience.
That doesn't seem to be enough for some people. The publicity got started with a BoingBoing blog entry, and was followed up with "Grateful Dead 'reversal' on fan-recordings is a smokescreen" where says, "There's a ripoff here, and it's not coming from the fans."
While it might seem reasonable to start rewriting history now that Jerry has been dead for ten years, doing so (particularly by people who were not active deadheads and tape traders) is as wrong now as it would have been then. I was definitely a deadhead but was never a taper, and was a lazy third-tier trader, but I got my fair share of nice material through the vines.
The Grateful Dead were always very liberal with audience recordings. They set up special tapers' sections, often in the audio sweet spots at shows. They sometimes let tapers patch into the soundboard, although many tapers considered that to be cheating because the board mix didn't include much audience sound. The Dead always thought it was fine for folks to trade tapes as long as it was strictly non-commercial.
At one point, a host of old soundboard tapes appeared in the tape-trading world; these were called "Betty Boards" for reasons explained here. At the time, the band was pretty pissed, but then eventually got used to it. At first, I was also pretty excited about the tapes, but as one taper friend said, "why would you want to hear the show without the audience?" The tapes I heard sounded sweet, but they were definitely more sterile than audience tapes for the same shows.
At some shows, the soundboard mix was broadcast within the venue as a way of getting it to the speakers out in the hallways, and some tapers simply copied that off the FM airwaves. (Why would the band put speakers in the hallways? Get a copy of the book "Skeleton Key" and see the article for "halldancing".) Many of those tapes were abandoned at the time, replaced by warmer-sounding audience tapes.
The band never said "you can have soundboards under the same rules as audience tapes". In fact, even when the soundboard folks were letting tapers patch in, it was always on a very limited basis. There were no implied restrictions on copying, and there certainly was no suggestion from the band that soundboard tapes were better in any way. Some deadheads thought they were better and thus sought them out; others explicitly didn't want them.
I have no problem with the Dead asking that soundboard tapes not be freely downloadable, given that those soundboard tapes have been freely traded for at least ten years. There is a huge difference between taking and sharing, and the Dead were always clear that they supported music sharing.
The folks who expect everything for free forever are not all that different than the people who would come to Dead shows and then get angry when no one would sell them a cheap ticket to get in. If someone doesn't see the wonders of all the still-downloadable audience tapes, the still-free trading of all tapes (audience and soundboards), and the easy convenience of buying very cheap soundboard-quality shows from regular CD retailers (hint: a 3-disc set selling for $22 is cheap), then maybe the Grateful Dead just aren't the band for that person.
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