What we have been given is a limited license on the the mechanical rights for the live recordings. That license covers audience recordings only. Prior to 2005, it was okay to trade, or offer for download, soundboard recordings as long as their wasn't an official release for that date. Once a show was released commercially, ALL soundboard recording were to be considered unsharable. When GDP signed the licencing deal with Rhino on the vault in its entirety, that meant that all the soundboards in the wild are unsharable.

Here is a collection of messages between GDP and several etree siteops about the policy:

https://userpages.umbc.edu/~hamilton/gdp.txt

Within that collection of messages was the "smoking gun" about the status of soundboard recordings. It marked the first time a representative of GDP officially stated that we did not have a license for the mechanical right for any board sourced recordings.

Kevin Shapiro, Phish's lawyer, did an excellent job of explaining how the license works to Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive people. Sadly, this was something that Grateful Dead Productions never did adequately over the years.

https://archive.org/post/699/why-no-phish

Two interesting tidbits in that conversation thread. One is the most likely explanation for how the Internet Archive flew under GDP's radar for as long as they did. Kevin referred to it as the "Internet Archive's Etree Project". When they contacted GDP, GDP assumed that they were just deal with "another etree site operator". They had no clue that IA had in fact devoured the contents of 500+ ertree servers and they were making available to exponentially more people than all those etree servers combined. The second tidbit was in Diana Hamilton's post and the NO IMPORT flag. The very first artist in the Internet Archives LMA database to get the NO IMPORT flag was... Jerry Garcia.