As stated about 6 months ago, trading certainly commercial materials is considered contraband.  Trading recordings of materials that are not available for sale and have never been on sale is considered "lawyer's discretion", and people making such trades are taking serious legal and financial risks.  I say this and make the statements that I do to legitimately "transfer the risk" (that is a legal term) from being the list owner's responsibility to the people doing trading.  The list owners and moderators don't read every line of every email, nor do we read every subject line, so if people offer to trade materials during the life of the list, the owners/moderators can't be considered responsible for deals that happen unnnoticed.  Now if you wave it in our faces, we are fully aware of what you are doing and the activity will be considered more thoroughly.
Legal precedent is that rampant theft of IP on the Internet is a target for litigation.  If you want to paint a target on yourself you are welcome to, but don't paint one on the Powderworks list.  This list was started as an honourable fan list, and trading show recordings was not acceptable in the early decade of the list's life.  Fundamentally trading is more likely to be illegal than legal, so if there's going to be a debate it will take a music industry lawyer's signed statement to convince me that trading recordings is legal.  I personally have always swayed in favour of paying the ferryman (I have no copyright materials that I do not own the store-bought CD/DVD of) and while I am charged with the survival of this list I will champion the musicians' interests and those of their chosen support structures (the music industry they signed up to) in favour of others' lifestyle preferences.
That should clarify things.  If not then we'll can explore options that can best meet the needs of the various interested parties.
RM

hooperadrianr wrote:

I must admit, I'm a bit confussed.

Didn't we just have a fairly lengthy discussion on this site in the
past few weeks about trying to ascertain whether the '81 Tanelorn
festival was filmed or recorded?  Didn't that discussion spin off from
a question about the existence of recordings (ie bootlegs) from '76
%'77?  Haven't there been countless offers to "weed" & "seed" booltegs
through this group (including obvious fan compilations like the
Anthoilogy vids)?  Do we not think for a second that if any of these
as yet unavailable shows suddenly surfaced we wouldn't all be
clamoring to get our hands on copies?

I agree, the copying and trading of commercially available releases is
a contraband topic and not condoned, but come on, weeded bootlegs have
been distributed through this list.

I'm not trying to be inflammatory but I am confused.  Could you please
clarify?  Thanks

Adrian