Insurance Agents Say Downloads Have No Value
A carefully aquired digital music collection has no value if a home or apartment is burglarized or damaged according to most home insurance policies. In fact, just a quarter of home insurance policies in the UK even offer to cover digital music downloads, according to USwitch.com. Only 10% of policies cover downloads valued over $3200.00.
Graphic: Is Your Digital Music Collection Covered By Insurance?
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Careful with interpretation here: “no cover” does not mean “no value.” “No cover” from an insurance company can mean “losses could be unpredictable and large.” For example, an insurance company might be prepared to pay out $1000 on a stolen laptop — they can evaluate the probability of laptop theft and what the average laptop is worth — but if the laptop is worth $10,000 due to the large iTunes collection on it, then the insurance company may feel they did not have a chance to evaluate that risk.
Similar situations can obtain with expensive jewelry.
The real question would become: will the insurance company offer a “rider” to cover downloaded songs? (And another question: what constitutes evidence that you had the songs, if the laptop is gone?)
The other way to look at this: everyone has to be a data archivist now. Backup, backup, backup!!
Everyone needs to self insure by using a backup service. Money from an insurance company in the event of data loss would be better than nothing, but better still is saving all of the blood sweat and tears you put into your music collection by being able to get it back.