4/20 - National Pot Smokers Day

This post is in commemoration of the Weedshare network.

April 20th is the 'unoffical' but world recognized Pot Smokers Day. And although the Weedshare network was 'officially' in no way a marijuana reference, anyone can see an obvious relationship between music and drugs in the name.

I've been in contact with several DRM databasing companies that I've been directed to by Intertrust, attempting to discover the background cost of setting up a media database similar to the original Weed network. Since the database and purchasing system is entirely automated, there's no reason why the cost of the DRM should be anywhere near 15% of every sale. Pennies per transaction would still amount to a significant amount of money for any company managing a Universal DRM Media database. More than enough to pay for the evolution of the network infrastructure itself.

I'm not personally interested in being an ICP in the Shared Media network anymore, it's caused me nothing but stress, frustration and a whole lot of debt. However, under the Original Sharing Incentive program, anyone willing to purchase a file 3 times can see the same Early Adopter distribution benefit available to ICPs. So while there is still a need for the ICP arrangement between the media licenser and the artist, it provides no real lasting benefit, so it wouldn't matter to me either way.

Provided the system was kept in it's previous form, anyone with an email address could earn money reviewing and marketing music and then withdraw it through a paypal registered bank account. Instead of the Record Label model where the real profit is accrued by one major corporation, this system acts directly to support the consumer and the artist, thereby acting to redistribute wealth on a large scale.

I can do it.

You can do it.

Anyone can do it.

Just not right now...

So for anyone who'd invested a lot of time and money in this distribution format, like myself, the system has basically crashed and there's no faith left in the digital media marketplace. Why would I want to invest time and money if someone can just shut the whole thing down on a whim? If anything, the WM-DRM beta version should have been left open indefinitely, with the new DRM versions being phased into the system instead of directly replacing the format. But... corporate whims being what they are, this isn't what was done.

So roll a big blunt today and think about a possible future thats being taken away from the world.