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Finally we may learn how it's possible what tiny fraction of those tens of petabytes of data (25? I forget) held hostage actually consists of content that the RIAA/MPAA holds rights to (back of the envelope calcs in another thread showed that there's simply not enough Hollywood movies been made to get to 5% of that amount, even if they were all encoded as 10GB BluRay rips--which the majority of movies produced is not available as).

It's the Porn Industry that should be suing for infringement, if anyone.

Even then, given the sheer amount of data stored on MegaUpload, IMO there's actually a fair possibility (though not a given) that at least a significant part of that data does not infringe anything. Copyright-infringing data is a finite resource, There's a huge amount of it, sure, but on the scale of petabytes it's finite and very non-trivial to get such amounts of it. Non-infringing but useful data, however, is still pretty much infinite at that level. There's logs, generated stuff, calculations, measurements, renderings, database backups.

It's guesswork, but I don't think it's improbable either. I'd really love to see a rundown of it, one day. And if it really turns out that a significant part of MegaUpload's data is indeed infringing content owned by the MPAA/RIAA, I'd be really curious to find out what part of my estimates were so wrong.



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