The Weed music distribution service, introduced by Shared Media Licensing in 2003, combines aspects of peer-to-peer filesharing and multi-level marketing in order to maximize the distribution of copyrighted music while at the same time providing income to the music's copyright holders. Weed files are in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format and are restricted by digital rights management (DRM). They can be freely shared on the internet. People on a supported operating system can play a Weed file three times for free using any WMA player. After that, they need to use the Weed software to purchase the file, which gives them the right to play it as often as they want. If they then share the original DRM-restricted file with others, they earn a percentage of the purchase price paid by 3 generations of their "downstream". 50% of the purchase price goes to the copyright owner, 20% goes to the person that gave the file to the purchaser, 10% to that person's supplier and 5% to the person that supplied the supplier. The Weed service receives the remaining 15%. A new release of Microsoft Windows Media Player, version 11, is no longer compatible with the Weed service.
External links
- The software and a number of Weed files can be downloaded from http://www.weedshare.com
