http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/rules.html
Official rules state:
By tilting the bottle you are following the rules, regardless of ethics or morality. You are under no obligation to buy the product in order to play the sweepstakes. That is why the ‘No purchase necessary’ disclaimer is said after every promotional sweepstakes commercial.
How do you get less? You got exactly what you paid for, a Pepsi. Anything else is a bonus.
Every time you tilt a Pepsi, God kills a kitten. Just think of Little Johnny, honest as the day is long, doomed to Pespi/iTune disappointment by the Tilting Terror. 
But the argument is that you weren’t just paying for a soda. You were paying for a soda and a 1/3 chance at a song.
When McDonalds runs that Monopoly promotion, and some staffer goes through and takes out all the winning pieces, the customers are getting less than they bargained for.
Isn’t this basically the same thing?
Only if the tilter was an employee of Pepsi, Apple, the store, or someone else with professional access to the bottle before it was put out for sale to the general public.
A closer analogy would be a shopper who knew a way to spot the over-ripe melons in the bin[sup]*[/sup] and thus he buys all the others. His knowledge gives him an advantage, but not an unfair one.
[sup]*[/sup]Or the disease-free hookers, if you prefer.
There are people who pay for songs they download?
hmm… interesting.
You’d think these guys would of learned by now. Coke did this same thing about 13 or 14 years ago, except they put a monetary value on the bottom of the tab you use to open the can. Now being a 13 year old kid at the time, my friend and I realized how much money we could make by going around the grocery store and looking for what amounted to free money. All we had to do was turn the tab around so that when you lifted it up to check, it wouldn’t open the can. When we found a winner, we’d just pop off the tab. This was of course unethical because not only were we denying someone else of winning, we effectively ruined the cans with no tab. Of course at the time we saw nothing wrong with this because each tab was 5, 10 or 20 dollars. We ended up getting several hundred bucks just for mailing all these tabs in. So I guess if I were 13 right now, I’d have pretty much every song you could imagine. Although with all the ways to get free music now, maybe this scam wouldn’t of even been worth my while.
Where do you shop, that has bins of hookers, disease-free or otherwise?
On a somewhat related issue, there used to be a set of baseball cards in which a few random packs contained rare cards which had foil backs. Each unopened pack had a small but theoretically random chance of having one of these cards inside. But some dealers would run the unopened packs through a metal detector and seperate out all of the ones containing rare cards.
Now to me personally, this seems clearly unethical. But tilting Pepsi bottles somehow doesn’t seem unethcial. However I can’t explain how there’s any difference between the two.
I think the difference is that you don’t need any special materials or talent to discern the winning bottles. The analogy to overripe melons is a good one. What about this one: a cracker jack company is giving away diamonds in their packages. I can detect the difference just by picking up the box. Is it unethical if I pick up all the boxes to feel for the heavy one? Am I only “allowed” to take the first box off the shelf? Is there a specific order in which the bottles must be bought? Aren’t you allowed to inspect a product before you buy it?
(I don’t really think the baseball card thing is unethical either. If the company didn’t want them doing that they should have put foil in every package. It’s easy enough to mask these things.)
So if I tilt the bottle, find a code, and then memorize the code and use it, leaving the bottle on the shelf, is that within the rules? (I realize that “No purchase necessary” refers to the ability to receive game pieces by mail, but I still think this is an interesting question.) Then you’ve not only “taken” someone else’s song, you’ve allowed them to spend a dollar thinking that they’ve won.
By the way,
Strictly speaking, are the MPSIMS “Share your Pepsi/iTunes codes here!” allowed?
You’ve reminded me of yet another one of my childhood scams. We had this baseball card shop in town that used to always try and rip us off. Who didn’t have one of those in their town by the way? Anyway, we decided to give them a little payback. We’d buy a whole bunch of packs and end up getting maybe 1 or 2 rare cards. This didn’t seem like a great ratio to us. So one day, I’m walking through my kitchen and see my parents bag re-sealer. Lightbulb now on brightly, I grab an empty pack and attempt to reseal it. It works like a charm. I grab all the worthless cards we had gone through and start filling the packs back up. We then sold the packs back to the card shop and kept all the rare cards. That was a great day.
Wal*Tart.
[sub]Thank you, you’ve been great. I’m here 'til Thursday[/sub]
Its not only unethical, its illegal. Not putting foil in every pack does not mean the company wants them to do that. Its no different than a lottery dealer at a delicatessen using a machine to find out which scratch off tickets are winners.
How is it illegal?
(On preview, I see that it wasn’t the customer who metal-detected the rare cards but the store owner. That’s a whole different story–conflict of interest and all. But I still don’t think there’s anything wrong if a customer does it. I mean, if you could get a metal detector into a store without being seen.)
I’m not sure if its legal for a customer to do it or not but I would bet that it isn’t.
But what law are they breaking? What’s the charge?
Ya got me. Maybe a doper lawyer will be along soon and can answer.
Agreed. Apple’s not saying “Buy a bottle of Pepsi. Open it. Look at underside of cap.”
Legally speaking (IANAL, so YMMV) sneaking a peek at the cap before purchase is entirely OK and in accordance with the promotion’s rules.
It’s a lowdown, stinky, rotten thing to do though.
Oh, and my interpretation of the rules about not trading, selling, etc. the codes means the thread in MPSIMS is in violation of the rules. Strictly speaking, if someone buys a bottle of Pepsi and tosses the cap without looking at it, you can’t take it, since you didn’t acquire it through the “no purchase necessary” process or by buying the bottle yourself.
[QUOTE=TJdude825]
So if I tilt the bottle, find a code, and then memorize the code and use it, leaving the bottle on the shelf, is that within the rules? (I realize that “No purchase necessary” refers to the ability to receive game pieces by mail, but I still think this is an interesting question.) Then you’ve not only “taken” someone else’s song, you’ve allowed them to spend a dollar thinking that they’ve won.
Actually, although I haven’t tried myself, I don’t think it’s possible to see the whole code by tilting the bottle. All you see is either a few letters or a few numbers. The few numbers obviously would indicate a winning bottle.
If you were able to see the whole code, then that is a whole new set of problems.