Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day

Expanding on this, if a company wants to claim that they always own a particular combination of bits should they pay rent for storing it on my system? The problem is people are generally short sighted and focused on the immediate future. Other considerations are rarely thought about until other people insist that something will affect their immediate future. There are costs associated with data that are rarely considered at the moment. No one to talk about this, it may change the way they do things and cost them money.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Just did a search for "1080" on some unnamed site and it appears a bluray rip of a movie encodes to roughly 10GB. So that would be 2.5 million movies in 1080p quality. I don't think we've made that many, have we? Especially if you consider that movies that came out before the "high-definition era" are encoded to about a 10th of that size (700MB-2GB roughly, afaik).

Maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Not counting TV series for instance (are they also intellectual property represented by the MPAA? I'm not in the USA so I never really dug into that).

Movies duplicated in different quality formats are usually a 10th or less of the size of a 1080p Bluray rip as well, as an upper limit I could add a factor of x1.5 for that.

But then, the "long tail" of movie rips are 700-800MB and do not have duplicates.

Unless ... is the MPAA also representing porn? Because then all bets are off and I can easily accept that this 25 petabyte consists mostly of MPAA protected intellectual properties.

But otherwise, what percentage of these 25 petabytes would you estimate actually represents illegitimate data owned/represented by the MPAA? 2% ? 10% ?

Is that fair to the owners of the other 90% of the data? Even if it's probably mostly porn? (I'm fairly sure most of the data has to be porn)

I'm just wondering. Also because it's interesting to speculate what could be in these 25 petabytes. If you have a better guess I'd love to hear it :)

The purpose of having a backup is so that you can restore your data after the original is lost, because there is a good chance the original will be lost. Explicitly retaining it on your local system is not enough to keep it safe. If it was, there would be no reason to backup in the first place.

If a million people used the service for backups, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect several of them to have a drive failure each and every day.

I've got 4TB of storage on my media server, last time I checked at ~60% used.At _best_, possibly 0.5% of that is stuff that I've personally created and have copyright over. Hell, all the email I've sent _or recieved_ that wasnt spam filtered since mid 1995 only comes to a few hundred meg - including attachments! Smething less than half a TB of it is music which I have some kind of right to have as digital files (some of it purchased as files, some of it ripped from cd and vinyl - which is somewhat less clear legally with respect to my rights to have a "copy" as a file on my hard drives). Realistically, outside of academia and industry (who presumably aren't significant users of MegaUpload) chances are so close to 100% that any 1GB+ file is copyright encumbered in a way that gives the MPAA an interest that it doesn't matter. The nearest I cold come to justifying the rest is that some of it it "time shifted" TV (from the PS3 TV tuner/PVR), some of it is DVD backups for discs I own, some migh euphemistically be referred to as "timeshifted DVD rentals or loans", but a _lot_ is copyrited content found on "channel BitTorrent" or downloaded from YouTube. If the copyright police confiscated _my_ hard disks and catalogued them in front of a judge, I'd have a very hard time looking him in the eye and saying "I didn't think I was doing anything wrong!"

I fear that line of argument bodes badly for dotcom…