Weedshare Getting Chopped By Windows Media “Upgrade”

The music-sharing site Weedshare, which uses a multi-level marketingish structure (above) to encourage swapping of its musical offerings, announced that it will be suspending operations because of a “security upgrade” to Windows Media Player that rendered Weedshared songs unplayable:

Weedshare’s owner, Shared Media Licensing, inserts its own information into the music’s tracking data, so that downloaded tracks can be played three times before charging.

However, Microsoft’s security improvements in Microsoft to WMP 11 read files as having been illegally tampered with and refuses to play them.

We never used Weedshare because of its Mac-unfriendly ways, but we couldn’t help but remember that Microsoft had applied for a patent for a setup like Weedshare’s, one that would eventually be used to encourage Zune users to share songs, at the end of last year. This came after John Beezer, president of Weedshare parent company Shared Media Licensing, assigned his rights for the Weedshare patent to Microsoft; now, the company is “moving away from Microsoft because of the cost and frustration,” according to Beezer. Not to mention the fact that sticking with Windows Media would only serve as a constant, cruel reminder that his former “partners” had, essentially, engineered him right out of his business model.

Windows Media Player sends music site silent [The Register, via No Rock And Roll Fun]