Et tu, Apple?

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!

--from Apple's legendary 1984 commercial

That was then. This is now.

I hate it when Apple makes me hate Apple.

This ad is just...

Words fail me.

Tune Recycler:

What's the deal with that Pepsi commercial?

Pepsi has begun airing an ad for this [iTunes giveaway] promotion that features 16 of the children who were sued by the major record labels for filesharing.†It's a perfect cycle: now that these kids and their families have been put in debt by the major labels, they have to sell themselves in a soda commercial to make back some of what they owe.†But the ad isn't just exploitative, it's also wildly inaccurate.†A girl in the ad says, "I'm one of the kids who was prosectued for downloading music free off of the internet." And throughout the commercial, the words "busted", "charged", "incriminated", and "accused" flash across the screen...††Now, while "busted" and "accused" might be ambigious enough to apply to these lawsuits, no one was "prosecuted" or "charged" with any crime.†Actually, none of the filesharing lawsuits has even gone to court, because the cost of mounting a defense against the major record labels is far too expensive for an individual or family.†Furthermore, none of these kids or anyone else was sued for "downloading music"; all the suits have been for uploading, which can be easily turned off in the settings of any filesharing program (here's howaccording to Charter Communications).†In fact, there haven't been any court rulings in the US that prohibit downloading music and the Canadian government has explicitly ruled that downloading is legal.

As reported on p2pnet.net, Josh Wattles, a lawyer and the former acting general counsel of Paramount Pictures, has said of the Pepsi ad "Falsely attributing criminal conduct to someone is a slam-dunk libel in just about every state...There's no calculus of relative harm to justify this kind of abusive, untruthful and cynical behavior towards minors no matter how complicit their misguided parents may have been in this deception."

The ad's final insult is that the background music is a Green Day cover of "I fought the law and the law won".†Now, we're usually hesitant to call anyone a sell-out because it's often counter-productive, and in the current major label music industry it can be difficult to avoid through no fault of the artists.††But, man, this is some serious sell-out bullshit.

I guess Apple decided to celebrate the anniversary of the 1984 ad by unironically adopting spirit of 1984.

(via Boing Boing.)