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

No, it's a problem.

The idea that law firms don't do IT is born of ignorance. Even the idea that the most used tool is a bookshelf of common interpretations of law is wrong, unsurprisingly all that stuff is online these days. Why on earth would anyone with two brain cells to rub together search for case histories on paper when there's Lexus Nexus which will do it in fractions of a second and is updated on a regular basis?

Yes these people are pretty conservative they're not stupid and they have money (a lot of money). Large law firms will typically have IT departments of hundreds and there's a significant market for companies specialising in supporting the legal sector.

But this is a tough problem because not only are there huge amounts of data involved but because people are actively trying to hinder your search. The law says that you have to to disclose everything relevant but it's pretty much common practice to also disclose a bunch of things that might be and a shed load of stuff you know full well isn't. This is a double win for the defending firm - not only can no-one accuse you of not providing everything they might want to see, but you get to do so in a way that makes very very difficult for them to find the stuff that matters.

Think of it this way - the problem is basically the same one Google have (already a pretty tough problem) only instead of the people providing the pages being keen that their information be discovered, they're actively trying to hide it.

If the insurance writer did their due diligence and realized the big single customer was MegaUpload (and what a large portion of MU's users were doing with the service), they would've been insane to write an insurance policy. I really don't think MU going down in an investigation falls under the category of "unforseeable." It was always a question of when, not if IMHO.

Just because you don't happen to have activities that generate enormous amounts of data doesn't mean nobody else does.

There's also people that make a lot more video data than you apparently do, same for sound recordings. Do you believe that the majority of recorded video data in the world is MPAA's? That would go against everything we know about the "long tail". You do realize that of all text (or books) written in the world, less than 1% actually gets published? Why would video or audio be any different? Just because you don't produce it, doesn't mean the MPAA industries are the only ones that do.

Also as you say, there's academia, PHD students I know use equipment that generates gigabytes per second. Or without equipment there's computer programs that do it from calculations. Now I agree it doesn't seem likely they'd use megaupload for that.

And that's just a few things I can come up with right now. Who knows what sort of computer stuff other people do that generates retarded amounts of data they need to share?

I'm also not saying that all that copyrighted stuff isn't there, it's just that if it's 25 petabytes worth of data, it just doesn't add up, the MPAA-represented copyrighted part of those 25 petabytes can only be a tiny fraction of that amount.

" … it just doesn't add up, the MPAA-represented copyrighted part of those 25 petabytes can only be a tiny fraction of that amount."

Interesting. My completely uninformed assumption is diametrically opposite to that. I'm guessing there's not much sophisticated de-dup going on, and _way_ more of the diskspace on MegaUpload is probably various bit-wise different rips of the same smallish set of Hollywood blockbusters. And while I agree the long tail suggests there's almost certainly lots of people out there with lots on non-mpaa-copyright encumbered files - I'd be quite surprised to find the area under the "long tail" was withing 2 or 3 orders of magnitude of the "fat head" occupied by all the copies of all the dvd rips and broadcast tv recordings.

I wonder if there's any believable data anywhere to see whether I'm wrong?

(Note: I've got a non-US-centric view of this too, here in Australia internet connection plans lag behind the US in terms of speed and bandwidth caps, so even though I've got friends who generate lots of GoPro footage for example, but they'll in general be storing them on locally attached harddrives, not trying to push gigabytes of raw data out into "the cloud". That might explain why I make tghe possibly-incorrect assumptions that I do…)