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.

-- The Grateful Dead