Live Bootleg CDs - Are they legitimate? Good quality?

@ozone46 I have been retired for 3 years, so you are resting my memory, but in the EU both bootleg recordings of concerts and unauthorized recordings of broadcasts are protected from a  copyright perspective, performer rights perspective, and broadcaster rights perspective under Council Directive 2006/115 EC.  So both are illegal in violation of the Directive.   If you have a broadcaster’s authorized copy, where the broadcaster has obtained performer rights for fixation (recording and distribution) and paid royalties to the artist, it is above board.  

spell check got me.  Wrestling not resting my memory.  

Not promoting but I use RockinConcerts that has tons of direct soundboard recordings.  Some are very good and I have no idea how they find all of these.

Even live DVD’s I have never seen before. 

Except for the Dead recordings, which I ignored, these mostly seemed to be from the 1970's. So I was not sure if perhaps that mattered: 50 years ago! And I see "bootleg" recordings for sale on Amazon, though perhaps those are given permission by the owners of the rights. Anyway, while there I wasn't thinking about the legalities of these. If illegal, I am surprised the seller had so many on display right out in the open. And people were freely discussing them as they were common knowledge and accepted practice.

Back in the old days when the hi-fi VHS VCR's came out . I recorded at least 150 hours of music concerts on a Fisher machine I purchased. The video was t.v and the sound was in stereo from KMET a FM station in L.A.and it was called simulcast. I keep them in the dark in a dust free enviroment. I tried once sending a couple to a company that put them on DVD but they did not transfer well. I still have the last generation made of the JVC super hi-fi VCR in good working condition and thru my McIntosh MA 7900 int. amp and stereo they sound is actuallly quite good the picture was never top notch because it was early cable t.v. in a fringe area but it is watchable and very enjoyable. I purchased in the past several cd's at the old Tower Records only to discover they were bootleg and the sound was not great.