If there's even a chance that Apple's iCloud or other cloud-music services are going to sniff a user's accumulated MP3 files for pirated songs, cloud music is going to die.

Am I a music pirate? I don't know. And I'm not sure I want to.

Next week, , which will most likely be a cloud service to host music, and probably photos, documents, and video as well.

A recent report by BusinessWeek suggests that Apple's iCloud will feature a "scan and sync" technology that will scan a user's MP3 library - and, instead of uploading the files to the cloud, will simply match those files to Apple's own library. Apple can keep a single, high-quality copy of a file in the cloud, and eliminate the need to keep multiple copies of the same song on its servers, each with slightly different variations on the title or bitrate.

What this means, of course, is that users who may have ripped their own CDs, or those of their friends, or their friends' friends, won't have to worry about the RIAA sniffing about their music collection. The thinking is that iCloud will be a subscription service, and that a lifetime of pirated music hosted on iCloud for a lifetime will eventually make back those licensing fees.

Phew.

Think about it. I don't lurk on Limewire () or BitTorrent, downloading music. If anything, I'll listen to my local radio station, KFOG, or troll the blues and U.K. hits on Slacker. Rarely do I feel the need to listen to a particular song right now. My last music purchase was the 99-cent Lady Gaga promotion at Amazon to gain access to the expanded Cloud Player.

But consider your own music collection. If you're over 30, chances are you have MP3s from CDs you own, your wife (husband) or girlfriend (boyfriend) owns, your ex-girlfriend owned, your friends own, your ex-friends owned, or the stranger at the laundromat. Maybe you shared an MP3 at a party. Google's offered a few MP3s on demo phones it's supplied to reviewers. Perhaps you asked your teenage daughter to load a few songs onto your iPod for the gym. Grabbed a mashup from the excellent Bootie Blog. (Illegal? Who knows?) Or possibly you grabbed a song from one of the many music apps on the Android Market. Heck, maybe you tried out the original Napster in those heady days when sharing music online was sharing, not stealing food from Lars Ulrich's pantry. And maybe you did grab an album from BitTorrent - or your friend did, or your friend's friend did.

Do you have receipts for all of your digital purchases? Likely not - not over the decade or more since Napster made "MP3" synonymous with digital music.

If history holds, just a few illegally copyrighted songs could result in penalties of thousands of dollars. Look around at all the nice things you own. Is an RIAA suit worth it? Or should you just buy a 32-Gbyte microSD card for $60 or so and call it a day?

Here's the point: if there's even a chance that the average consumer is going to be made into the next , the average consumer is going to shy away. And cloud music is going to die.

MSpot: We don't check for pirated songs

So, in a sense, cloud music services need to choose sides. Amazon's , which offers 5 Gbytes of storage for free (and a total of 20 Gbytes with the purchase of an MP3 album) and , which will store about 20,000 songs for free, will be iCloud rivals. Both Google and Amazon have argued that their cloud services are just online storage lockers that don't require licenses from the music labels, even though Google has talked tough about piracy and Google Music.

mSpot, however, has provided the most comforting assurances that users can store music on the company's servers without the RIAA looking over their shoulder. "We don't police; there is no hidden agenda," chief executive Daren Tsui told me recently. In other words, is private.

What MSpot plans to do, however, is to roll out a feature by the end of the year that would point users in the general direction of authenticated, copyrighted music. Tsui wouldn't say what that feature was, but it appears that mSpot will emphasize discovery, rather than policing.

Other cloud competitors exist. MP3Tunes and ZumoDrive offer 2-Gbytes of storage for free, and MP3Tunes is offering invitations for 10 Gbytes; SugarSync also offers 5 Gbytes for free, plus paid plans.

None of them, of course, offer the cachet of Apple. And none of them, of course, have become as close as Apple has to the labels.

Some - I'll go so far as to say the majority of you - have purchased all your music legitimately. Chances are that kids born in the age of iTunes have nothing to fear. For everyone else - well, we'll find out Monday.