I was poking about in the Internet Archive's list of artists who opt in to allow the archive to collect and trade their recorded concerts, and this lead me to the eTree Wiki page on Being Trade Friendly and their very seasoned reasoning for why bands should side with the shareables ... and to make a long story short, all of what these sites said made perfect sense, completely compatible with our own unspoken policy on recordings:

Please share, and be nice

May and I have a simple philosophy on recordings: You can record our shows (providing you don't interfer with other people's enjoyment), you can download our complete tracks, burn them, trade them, mix them, scratch them, fold them into origami earrings if you so wish provided whatever you create from our work obeys these same rules --- it's called Share and Share-alike and we think it's fair for everyone. If you've got commercial uses in mind, please ask first, chances are we'll say yes anyway, but sometimes it's not our call.

songs vs recordings

This shareability on our recordings does not necessarily extend to the songs. Sometimes it does, such as May's Earthday Song which is freely available for whatever folk adaptation you want to make of it, but others in our download archive are copyright and registered and require licensing, again, only for commercial purposes.

I've been in contact with Lawrence Lessig on this, and he has some experts mulling it; in my opinion, a single CreativeCommons licensing is a little ambiguous with respect to music because music has two levels of creative property. There is the song or score or arrangement (the plan) and there is the work itself, and I think most songwriters hope for at least some recognition and control over accidentally penning a state anthem, but they may not feel so protective of a walkman club-date recording.

This difference is like the script of a play vs a record of the performance; we place very few restrictions on sharing our performance recordings (which includes our studio performances) but we may reserve some additional rights on some of our original songs, the scripts and plans, particularly when used for commercial purposes.

Other Minds

There are as many definitions of 'Shareable' as there are artists to make them, but for general reference, here's a list of sites where some other known and not-so known artists have opted in or out of the file-trading game:

• eTree Trade-Friendlies
• Bands that Allow Taping
• FurtherNet's Band List
• JamGrass Recording Guide
• Bluegrass-Box No-Trade list

What's clear to me is that few fans will really bother to sift all these collections (and the many more lists we don't know) to find out whether or not they can bring a vidicam or portable recording-walkman to the hall or rip the CD and dump the tunes to Gnutella --- shareability needs to be a band policy, it needs to be talked about, and it needs to be stated up-front, by the artists themselves, in an obvious place, online and searchable.

Like in your blog sidebar :)