What is the opinion of the members here about...

[Jazz Groove]

What is the opinion of the members on this board about sharingthegroove.com?

For those that don' know what it is, it is a Napster type, where only live recordings are posted for downloading. They claim that it is completely legal. There's a lot of Miles Davis, JohnColtrane, HErbie Hancock, Shorter, Silver, Jimmy smith, Blakey from the 50's, Pass, Peterson, Mingus, Bird, Wes with Coltrane. All of the files are not stuff that can be bought.

I haven't down loaded anything. I feel the artists aren't getting any royalties. They site claims the artists are okay with it. I don't buy it for a second. A frind of mine did down load stuff. He let me listen to Art Blakey from 57. The sound was great. I could not believe this was a bootleg.

I'm starting to get tempted...

[Dan Gould]

I wouldn't be so sure about what is and isn't "unavailable". One of the Blakey downloads I am almost sure is from a European CD I have, maybe a Fontana, I'm not entirely sure.

Looking through the FAQs I see that this is peer-to-peer distribution, so I suspect that our firewall is going to be a problem there anyway.

But if these are truly live recordings, I frankly see this as a technological advance in the ageless "tape trading" community, just swapping files instead of tapes or CDRs. To the extent that these are live recordings and not bootlegs of copyrighted works, I've never seen why this is a terrible thing. If the material doesn't benefit Horace Silver or Miles Davis to begin with, what is the harm of trading (or downloading)?

So, I don't think I'll sign up for this, though I have to admit I have half a mind to post an "In Search of Gene Harris" thread!

[AfricaBrass]

I love this kind of stuff! Especially the sites that trade taper-friendly bands.

I haven't tried, sharingthegroove, but thanks for the tip, I will.

One that I've had a lot of success is the furthurnet.org peer-to-peer trading system, they don't have a lot of jazz, but if you like the Grateful Dead (like me), it's Heaven.