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WHEN IS THE BILLIONTH DOWNLOAD NOT THE BILLIONTH DOWNLOAD?
There's a lot of excitement as Apple prepares itself to spit out download number 1 Billion (US billion, of course) from the iTunes Music Store. Most of the excitement takes the form of grumbling that the official counter isn't counting properly, and the noise of people building more "accurate" counters. But this does miss the point slightly, as the person who wins a ton of bounty (British ton, of course) for being the 1,000,000,000th downloader might not actually be the real billionth download - indeed, you can enter yourself for a chance to be the symbollic billionth downloader without downloading anything, or even having iTunes on your computer.
Yes, that confuses us - it's a bit like a supermarket waiting to greet its millionth customer, but giving the store dash to someone popping into the launderette next door.
5 comments:
Wow... gotta love that form:
"Limited to 25 entries per day"
Nothing like giving everyone an equal chance or two, or 25 per day...
The additional form is to not run afoul of a California state law that requires that contests which give away a certain amount of stuff must be "no purchase necessary." It's fairly common in the States. To be honest, I have no idea what the point of the law is, though.
There's a similar law in the UK... but then it's not "the billionth download", is it? It's just a prize draw to celebrate the billionth download, which is quite another thing entirely.
Also... if, say, a newspaper puts up a prize of a million pounds to the first person to swim the atlantic or whatever, they don't have to provide a form for the non-swimmers...
IANAL, but I vaguely remember reading that "no purchace necessary" only applies to competitions where its just luck (i.e. no skill is involved in winning). Therefore a competition like swimming the Atlantic would exempt.
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