Are you worried that iCloud could tell Apple just how much music you've pirated? A humorous infographic by technology and pop culture comic Joy of Tech suggests that a lot of people are.

iTunes Match is a service that makes it easy for Apple's customers to get their music into the company's cloud, whether they originally bought it from iTunes or not. For about $25 a year, the service scans your music collection, maps it to Apple's iTunes library, and automatically places high-quality versions of the songs into your iCloud account, making it easy to download them onto any device loaded with iTunes.

But if Apple can somehow detect illegal downloads, perhaps it could also delete them from a user's library.

Forbes' Parmy Olson asked Pirate Bay cofounder Peter Sunde for his thoughts:

[Sunde] says iTunes Match marks a big step towards consumers losing control of their media. The problem isn't the $25, it's that it doesn't make sense to pay Apple, with its closed-source system, to gain access to music you've downloaded. More crucial than that, he says, is what that could mean for the future of sharing music. [...]

Sunde's other big worry is that some day, Apple might actively remove music tracks from your iCloud account which are deemed illegal. "They might say, you can't do that, so you have to remove it," Sunde says, adding that when your music is put on iCloud, Apple essentially owns that data, not you. It's stored on their server, not yours. "So they [could] also decide which music you can't have. That's what you're allowing in the future."

Philip Elmer-DeWitt of CNN Money sees the situation differently, suggesting that the $25 fee every year is actually the cost of amnesty from record-label interference with pirates:

A one-time charge of $25 to convert up to 25,000 pirated songs to legal iTunes-plus quality copies is a no brainer. If [my kids] plan to continue stealing music, however, they'll have to make a calculation at the end of the year. Have they collected enough new music to justify spending another $25 to bring them into the iTunes fold?

Ars Technica's Chris Foresman says Apple is unlikely to get involved in policing pirated content one way or the other:

There doesn't appear to be a reliable way for Apple to know for certain if a particular song has been pirated—barring certain metadata that could be easily stripped out—so really the only benefit is that low-quality rips get replaced with high-quality rips.

Even if Apple doesn't police tracks, however, its deal with record companies may mean that they get paid royalties on the tracks it pulls into the cloud, according to a report ahead of the announcement by the New York Post:

The music companies will divide the fee with Apple, with the tech firm taking a 30 percent cut, 12 percent going to music publishers, and the rest to the labels to divide with their artists.

In some cases, this means that labels and artists are getting paid for pirated tracks; in others, they'll get paid twice for a song a user bought once.

Steve Jobs is famous for "One more thing"—the final announcement at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in which he lays out the most awesome thing he has to announce.

Yesterday's "One more thing" was iTunes Match, a service that scans a user's library of songs and compares them to Apple's vast iTunes music library. If the service finds a match, the user can treat that song as part of iTunes in the Cloud, meaning it's stored by Apple and can be easily downloaded onto any device. This costs $24.99 a year, and it's what Apple seems to have done with Lala, the music startup it acquired back in December 2009.

Lala allowed users to stream music from the Web to a browser, anytime, anywhere. Users could listen to any song once, or pay 10 cents for the right to stream a song. Another way to get music into Lala's system was to download Lala's Music Mover tool, which scanned your existing music library and matched what it found against its own records. If the Music Mover found you already owned a song, it credited you in Lala's Web system, and you now had the right to play that song. Music Mover was most likely the foundation of iTunes Match.

It's going to be a valuable tool for Apple, and a powerful draw for iTunes in the Cloud. Uploading songs to a cloud drive is a pain, and the manual upload required for Amazon's Cloud Drive, for example, was seen as a major obstacle to adoption. Users will undoubtedly like being able to get all their music into Apple's digital storage unit in minutes rather than hours.

Seeing iTunes Match, however, makes me think that Apple is unlikely to use Lala's streaming technology. With Match, Apple's already getting a valuable and potentially lucrative piece of technology out of its acquisition of the startup. It's possible that Lala's team also helped create Ping, the so-so social network that's now part of iTunes, which is a hobbled version of some of the social features that Lala had.

Given the trend toward limitations on data plans and Steve Jobs' famous concerns about quality (which may, for example, have inspired Apple to make users download movie rentals from iTunes instead of streaming them), Apple may decide that Lala's streaming technology is more trouble than it's worth--at least for now.

The specifications of iTunes in the Cloud will shape the battle for the future of how media content is delivered. Amazon and Google have both envisioned music services that include streaming as a significant component.

When Apple bought streaming music service Lala, speculation was that the company intended to work on a Web interface for iTunes. Lala's engineers would certainly have had the expertise, and the company had an interesting approach to the concept of owning songs--users could buy "web albums" which gave them unlimited streaming rights but no downloads or physical copies.

Now there's more reason to suspect that the company intends to make a Web interface for iTunes. Cupertino is hiring a user interface engineer for a position that could be tailored to the project. The job description says the engineer will be "responsible for implementing interactive, rich media projects within the iTunes group" and proceeds to list familiarity with a number of Web technologies as qualifications.

I hope we will see a Web interface for iTunes. I loved Lala's vision of how users would want to consume music, and it's time for Apple to move forward from the mp3 player model. Users today are connected to the Internet more than ever, and we need music services that take full advantage of this.