DEAD GRATEFUL
FOR COPYRIGHT LAWS

The Grateful Dead have weighed in on the controversy surrounding Napster and the online delivery of music.

"They have always been vehement about this: If someone is going to make money, it should be them," said Eric Doney, the Dead's attorney. "The music belongs to the creators, not someone else."

The Dead's no-nonsense stance underscores the depths of the music industry's anti-piracy sentiment as computer technology makes more recordings available for free over the Internet, the Associated Press reports.

While the Dead officially remains neutral in the Napster controversy, the service violates a policy the band established a few months before the immensely popular Web site started last year.

As digital audio files such as MP3 emerged as a viable format, the Dead reiterated its long-standing commitment to allowing fans to trade recordings of the band's 2,300 concerts. Under the April 1999 policy, though, the Dead declared that "no commercial gain may be sought by Web sites offering digital files of our music, whether through advertising, exploiting databases compiled from their traffic, or any other means."

Doney said the Dead's digital policy is a natural extension of the band's longtime commitment to sharing its music with its fans without compromising its intellectual property rights.

"We have never ever allowed anyone to sell a tape of a concert—not even for the price of just the tape itself," Doney said.