Weedshare is a great idea for music filesharing - Weedshare pays their users to share their music collection in the proprietary weed format and share them online. You can listen to any Weed file for free three times (in Microsoft Media Player), after that you must purchase the song to keep listening to it.

The artist always receives 50% of each sale, and the rest goes to those who helped distribute the file. You get 20%, the person who shared the file with you gets 10%, and the person who shared the file with that person gets 5% of the sale price. Weed collects 15%. Essentially an upside-down pyramid scheme.

Weedshare is based on the broken DRM system in Media Player, which means that you can lose all your music when changing machines and can't burn an audio CD for playback in standard audio devices, but is a cool idea for all that.

Weedshare could be very viable IF supported by the record companies and if the client was also a weed format ripper. The music industry would get a free production and distribution network for their product - rewarding loyal fans for sharing. Of course the music industry would have had to figure out reasonable pricing and allow access to their entire catalog.

This is brand-new and can't be expected to have wild success from the start, but a Kazaa (lite of course) search for -weed- as suggested in the weedshare FAQ resulted in 4,850 files (including the screamingly funny "Weed With Willy"), but no weedshare files.

A good idea, but too little too late and Big Content has been attacking their customers so long it seems impossible for them to see an oportunity for change.