
Storing 25 petabytes of Megaupload data costs us $9,000 a day - ttt_
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/isp-storing-25-petabytes-of-megaupload-data-costs-us-9000-a-day.ars?clicked=related_right
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johngalt
I've dealt with e-discovery sets. No one really has answers to what to do when
you have a litigation hold on data. Legislation commonly requires "retention
of anything related to X case", but how do you know what's relevant and what
isn't? When you are a third party the ambiguity increases. So you end up with
an _everything and kitchen sink_ data dump. Even with _everything_ the data is
commonly useless without context. You have files without access logs and logs
referrencing local namespaces etc...

With a 25 petabyte discovery, I'm not surprised that everyone's scratching
their heads on what to do next. This isn't just an MPAA/Megaupload problem.
Even a smaller dataset like a 10-20TB discovery has numerous problems.
Hosting/indexing/classifying/reviewing millions of documents is an open issue
for the legal field. What do you do when there are multiple parties who all
need to see "everything"? If everyone does their own thing how do you
reference materials in a consistent manner across the interested parties? If
you all agree to host the data in a neutral place who pays for it? What if the
technology of that host benefits one party at the expense of another?

For years the legal field has had a "print it all out and have a team of
paralegals go over it" viewpoint. Clients don't pay for computers, but they do
pay for paralegal hours. Only recently has that become untenable. Discovery
sizes are growing exponentially per year. It's common to have a new discovery
set come in larger that every previous set combined, and the legal industry
doesn't really know what to do about it.

~~~
astrodust
If it's anything like the usual proceedings, the lawyers involved would
probably prefer if they had several copies of the data, too.

I'm sure most of these drives were arrayed in such a fashion where they're
unreadable unless in the proper equipment. It's not like you can just buy a
pile of off-the-shelf external drives and start copying, either, as the
contents might be unreadable unless the proper software is installed and
configured correctly.

~~~
phillmv
Not to mention that it would cost (1Tb * $109 @ newegg) * ( 25,000 Tb)
$2,725,000 just to replicate it.

~~~
papercrane
I'm sure you could get a bulk discount though.

------
shrike
The federal government does have a process for this sort of thing, if they
seize an alleged drug dealer's house and that house has a mortgage the United
States Marshals Service will pay the mortgage. If they seize cars, furniture,
other assets the government is responsible for the storage of those items
until the case has been resolved. [1]

I would guess that MegaUpload's lawyers will make the claim that the data on
those servers is critical to their defense and must be maintained. That is
probably an accurate claim, DotCom will want to present evidence of compliance
with DMCA notices, counter the claim that a "majority" of the content was
under copyright, etc. Best case for DotCom would probably be that his lawyers
argue for retaining the data and the judge lets Carpathia destroy it anyway.
That would give DotCom reasonable grounds for appeal.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture>

~~~
Duff
You hit it on the head. I used to have to deal with alot of litigation-related
preservation of data... we started calling discovery "Mutually Assured
Destruction".

The lawyers basically try to make things more and more onerous in order to
encourage a settlement. It's amusing, as long as you aren't accountable for
the data!

------
anon808
It sucks, but that's the price of doing business. They chose their customer,
and now are (unfortunately) tied to consequences. Same thing happens to
building owners who have a crime committed by a tenant, the leased space
becomes a crime scene until the police/govt are done with their investigation.

~~~
xymostech
But instead of just losing use of those servers, they have to actively
maintain them. It looks like they just want someone to pay for the $9000 per
day that it costs to keep the servers running, they aren't looking for money
that they lost from not being able to use the servers.

To go with your analogy, sure building owners aren't allowed to rent the space
back out, but they most certainly not asked to pay for usual water, gas, or
electricity bills (because they aren't/shouldn't be being used).

~~~
rmc
Why are the servers still running? Surely it's easier and cheaper to just turn
off the servers, power down the racks and lock the cages?

~~~
deadmike
I'm wondering this, too. The data would still be there, and they wouldn't have
to worry about maintenance costs at least, right?

~~~
Retric
Shutting them down could easily destroy evidence depending on how it's done.
EX: Many redundant systems try replicating data from machines that are taken
off line. What happens when the full network is taken off line quickly has
probably not been tested.

~~~
deadmike
I see, so even just shutting down the servers hosting MU's data could be
damaging to the whole network?

------
tripzilch
So, 25 petabytes ... 25 million gigabytes. Anyone care to guess how much of
this data is illegitimate? And how much of _that_ is under MPAA's copyright?

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 :)

~~~
bigiain
Think of the problem from the opposite direction. What the hell _else_ could
the bulk of that possibly be?

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…

~~~
tripzilch
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.

~~~
bigiain
" … 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…)

------
orbitingpluto
In civil or criminal asset forfeiture, the state can conceivably confiscate
property if used for or if it enables a crime. In some jurisdictions it
doesn't even matter if the owner of the property and the criminal have really
nothing to do with each other. (i.e. Your stolen SUV was used to rob a liquor
store.)

Also, the government could have probably seized everything anyway as evidence.
The problem with that is setting up that much rack space and network
infrastructure isn't cheap.

That's Carpathia's basis for compensation. They are providing a service to the
government. Seems like a no-brainer.

------
VikingCoder
Help me out with the math here:

1 terabyte costs them $128.41 per year, right?

Amazon S3 would cost them roughly $444 per year, if they were using the
Reduced Redundancy Storage.

The cheapest HD that I see on pcpartpicker (in terms of Price/GB) is the
Western Digital Caviar Green 2.5 TB (5400 RPM) for $135.43, which is
$0.054/GB. That's $54.17 per TB.

If you want a single backup, that's $108.34 per TB. Two backups (3 copies of
each file), is $162.51 per TB.

So, if I'm doing this right, as long as their HDs last at least 15 months, on
average, they have triple-redundancy, and the cheapest price ratio for
consumer hardware. And I'm not even counting their power, network, cooling, or
puny humans to maintain it all. That means their HDs, if they were made out of
the cheapest parts I could find, would have to last significantly longer than
15 months, on average.

They're actually doing really good on price, if you ask me.

Or am I missing something obvious, or doing the math horribly wrong?

~~~
njharman
The hardware cost 1.25 million. It cost $9000/day in
electricity/connectivity/rackspace.

~~~
brownbat
True. I'm honestly surprised they didn't declare daily depreciation, for $1.25
million in assets that are obsoleted by new technology at Moore's pace, I'd
expect that could arguably be quite high.

------
bshep
Its the storage disks the government need, not the rest of the server
hardware, if they cant come up with an agreement then shutdown all the
servers, take out the disks, catalog, and put in a warehouse somewhere. They
are now free to re-use the rest of the server for something else.

That would satisfy the needs of the government if they need access to the
data, preserve it if in the future people are allowed to download it, and
prevent the MPAA from complaining that it was given back to Megaupload.

I'm sure the cost of storage would not be minimal, but they could still use
the rest of the hardware and not have to keep the servers powered up.

Possible problems:

\- Maybe the servers cant be shutdown and brought back up without certain
passwords or encryption keys

\- Labor cost of shutting down and catalogging all those disks ( if done
progressively would probably work )

\- Others?

~~~
jlawer
You want to pull 1,103 server's disks?

The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a
hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware
revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)?
Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it.

Not to mention hard drive costs are still high, post thai floods. For
enterprise gear we are getting most quotes ~ $300 AUD a disk, for consumer
gear its ~ $130. Most servers are running at least 2 disks... that $286K worth
of disks alone if your talking cheap - low capacity disks, not including
labour to change the disks and test the hardware before you deploy a workload
to it.

~~~
Karunamon
>The compatibility problems you have trying to get data off a disks in a
hardware raid make it impractical (do you have the EXACT SAME version hardware
revision & firmware; without this you can't guarantee you can read it back)?
Its either that or you have to pay data recovery guys to rebuild it.

Forgive me for for sounding like a member of Anonymous but..

So? That's the government's problem. I don't see why a private company should
be in any position where they're required (at wallet or gun point) to help in
an investigation at their own expense. Pull the drives, warehouse them, and
let the FBI do what they have to do. They have IT to rebuild the RAIDs.

~~~
lotu
Carpathia wants to be paid $9000 a day like they were before the Megaupload
case started and pulling the drives and telling the FBI that it's their
problem doesn't do that.

~~~
Karunamon
No, but it stops the costs from accruing. Legal action could then be brought
to recover their other costs.

------
nextparadigms
This is why the US Government shouldn't have seized the site first, and asked
questions later. They should've filed a trial against them, and let them keep
hosting the data, and if found guilty, _then_ take it down.

~~~
sliverstorm
I agree, standard operating procedure when dealing with digital information
should always include a generous window for destruction of evidence.

~~~
darklajid
I disagree. Servers should be inaccessible, but not at all accessed by the law
enforcement agency coming up with claims in court - why would they need to
look at that amount of data anyway and why should tax payers suffer.

Just - put them behind bars. I said so.

------
brownbat
The urgency is because Carpathia's lease has run out, they can't stay at the
$9k/day facility.

Carpathia has to pay $65k to move the servers, then $37k per month to keep
them in a climate controlled facility while powered down. Lost profits are
still a relevant consideration. This is a doozy of a damages calculation.
What's depreciation on assets that are rendered obselete by (something like)
Moore's law?

I'd say Carpathia deletes the data and then supports the petitioners (those
with lost data) in the takings clause case against the government. Carpathia
claims indemnity against claims by pointing at MegaUpload and the Feds, but
probably gets joined in a bunch of messy lawsuits. Real roll of the dice.

------
ericd
Why are options that would destroy any chance at Megaupload conducting
business in the future even on the table before a trial is finished? I suppose
a large amount of damage is already done, but it would be a gross injustice to
kill their business before anything started. The government should pay to keep
this up until they've conducted their trial. If they don't, and they lose
somehow, I hope they get hit with a massive countersuit.

------
moonboots
For reference, this amount of data would require 190 backblaze storage pods
($7,384 for 135TB) totaling $1.4 million.

~~~
DanBC
Is that pre- or post- Thailand flooding prices? (Have drive prices settled
down again?)

And is there any redundancy included in your figures? (25 petabytes / 135
terabytes == about 190 pods)

~~~
moonboots
Backblaze quoted this price before the flood at $120 for 3TB. I'm not sure if
post-flood prices are back to these prices or what range of prices you can
expect at this volume.

This figure doesn't include redundancy. Backblaze uses raid6, so the usable
capacity is actually 117TB per pod[1]. With this configuration the final cost
should be closer to $1.6 million.

    
    
      [1] http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2341206&cid=36834390

~~~
nknight
> _$120 for 3TB_

So even if you throw out the rest of the hardware and have zero redundancy,
$40/TB * 25000 terabytes = $1,000,000.

(Of course, somebody has to ship and store over 8,000 HDDs, too.)

------
adrianpike
Can someone more familiar with this stuff explain why Carpathia's still paying
for "power and connectivity"?

I would have assumed that the FBI would have actually seized the servers, or
at the very least pulled the network cables out.

~~~
gee_totes
Not if the evidence is on the servers.

------
DanBC
I'm really confused by this. Is Megaupload (or any megaupload employee) facing
a criminal trial? How can any "evidence trial" (or whatever they call it) be
maintained if a law-enforcement agency doesn't have the drives?

Have any hashes been taken of the drives?

------
jlawer
The costs of moving that amount of data is crazy. I am surprised the
government hasn't seized the hardware, and chucked it in a warehouse.

I did some back of an envelope calculations... and its absolutely crazy. Tape
would require over 17,000 Ultrium tapes. Now you could De-dupe... but the
hardware to process and dedupe that much data.... not really an option. Not to
mention the time to write that many tapes...

Something like thumpers (48 disk sun x86 boxes) would be expensive, last time
I looked they were around say $30k for a large order... 160tb usable assuming
4tb disks are the thumper is split into 4 Raid 6 arrays... thats 160
thumpers... 4.8 Million

Even backblaze pods would likely be well over a Million...

This doesn't even cover hosting costs, transfer and such. Not to mention to be
usable in court there are going to have to be processes in place to document
compliance and validity of the copy....

All in all not a great place for Carpathia to be in.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
> Now you could De-dupe... but the hardware to process and dedupe that much
> data.... not really an option.

FYI, the data is already comprehensively de-duped.

~~~
jlawer
I know they dedupe on the file level, but I wonder if they are doing block
level deduping... as without a big shared storage infrastructure block level
deduping becomes pretty hard to serve at high speed from as the reads
potentially become distributed across hundreds of nodes...

To build out web scale systems you generally use commodity gear and accept the
overhead of duplication, heavy deduping requires massive IO, and there is no
way i can see you can be dealing with that much data have that level of IOPS
and be profitable charging what they charge.

------
genu1
This post really hurts my soul.

Can Carpathia sue the Federal Government for NOT seizing assets. It's the
data, not hardware. Data is transferable. They want it, take it.

Can Carpathia sue? This kind of injustice just makes me boil.

------
Zikes
Pardon my ignorance, and this is a serious question, but why can't they just
turn them off? I realize it doesn't address all the costs, but surely it could
reduce them significantly.

~~~
frio
While I'm obviously uninvolved, there are several reasons why turning them off
might be a hassle. Primarily is that if anything is encrypted, the encryption
key is currently in memory and the disks are already open - turning the
servers off might require reentering details.

Alternatively, in a setup of this size, I imagine there'd be no end of
redundancy configurations - RAID for individual disk sets, DRBD (/a SAN
equivalent) across servers - turning them off would turn all that HA tech off.
Meaning that, when you try to bring the system back up, the redundancy
implementation might say "oh no, I've lost x peers from my set of n" and fail
itself completely.

Shrug. I've no doubt explained it badly, but there are good reasons to keep
them running. It's not just a case of "pop the hard drive out and use it
elsewhere"; the logic associated with keeping 25 petabytes of data would also
have to be restored to its current state.

------
mmaunder
This gives an idea of the economic activity generated by services like
megaupload and what is being removed from the economy by killing the company.
Roughly $3.2 million in hosting fees, and could be more if that's just the
cost price. Also salaries, over $1 million in hardware, and the various other
suppliers. One wonders about the GDP of the recording and movie industries
relative to the businesses they're going after.

------
jneal
What's the big deal? Just delete the data. Customer pays for storage. Company
stores. Customer stops paying for storage. Company deletes.

Sure, a bunch of pissed off people will certainly be upset - but it's not the
company's fault - they shouldn't have to bear this burden. I can't see how
they could be sued by users for this, they didn't enter into any kind of
agreement with the users, only with the customer.

~~~
zevyoura
The article also mentions that they need to hold onto the data because it may
be used as evidence in the court case.

~~~
brown9-2
It boggles my mind that the court hasn't taken position of the hardware/data
then.

If the hardware is left running, and not in official custody, how do any
authorities know that the data isn't being tampered with?

------
jakejake
I can definitely understand the lost potential revenue of having unused
servers. But I wonder why they are saying that cost includes power and
connectivity for the servers? Seems like they would be powered down. I would
actually have assumed the servers to be confiscated and taken off-premise by
the FBI.

~~~
aqme28
It's possible (though I'd doubt it is the case) that those servers have data
from other clients as well.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Any large datacenter has storage allocated in complex ways. IT may be
challenging to isolate one customer's data physically from another. For
instance, physical disks can be virtually concatenated then repartitioned into
virtual storage containers, which may reside on part of 1, or parts of many
physical disks.

They could of course migrate all of the contested data onto new storage. But
its large; who would pay for that?

~~~
jakejake
That makes the most sense to me.

------
katane
There are legal obligations for the government to reimburse telco companies if
they are asked to spy on their customers on the governments behalf. Also,
obviously, if you want to use data as evidence in a trial, it needs to be
stored safely by the police and sealed off, to ensure that its integrity is
preserved.

So either the government needs to pay up, store the drives themselves or
dismiss these thousands of harddrives from the witness bench.

Also, I cant see how the EFFs claim has any legal merit. Theres no obligation
for a site to enable you to access data you sent them.

------
guan
Megaupload had a lot of assets that were frozen. I don’t know about the
legailities, but it would be reasonable to use frozen funds to pay for this.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I really doubt that would be legal. It would be akin to the government can
forcing you to pay for them to prosecute you.

Of course, I think the whole category of forfeiture law it blatantly contrary
to the Fourth Ammendment, so what do I know.

~~~
ItsTrueYouKnow
> It would be akin to the government can forcing you to pay for them to
> prosecute you.

Taxes?

------
firefoxman1
I know any legitimate hosting company would never do this, but it would be
amazing if they just "happened" to have very loose security on the servers
that hold Megaupload's data, and if some hacker were to..."gain unauthorized
access" and wipe all the data.

They wouldn't be held responsible for a breakin, would they?

~~~
rmc
If a court orders them to take "reasonable, and industry best practice
computer security approaches to prevent the data being lost", then, yes, they
would be responsible for "accidentally-on-purpose" leaving the servers
accessible. If it were to happen, someone would do a post-mortem, find out
that they intended for it to be broken into, and then they would be guilty of
contempt of court/destroying evidence/etc.

~~~
firefoxman1
Yeah, realistically it just wouldn't be worth it. But it's fun to imagine.

------
av500
Are there seriously people that used Megaupload as their sole and only place
to store their data? What if there was a fire in the server room? Or some MU
intern typed rm -rf /?

~~~
gwern
Believe it or not, there are even people who don't have backups at all. I
know, right?

~~~
georgemcbay
Not backing up your important data is passive stupidity.

Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is active
stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever happened in
the real world.

~~~
randomdata
> Backing up your data on Megaupload and then not keeping a local copy is
> active stupidity of such vast scale that I refuse to believe it has ever
> happened in the real world.

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.

~~~
georgemcbay
Do you really think a million people used Megaupload for backups, when the
service was nearly completely unusable for that task?

Do you think they were zipping up the contents of their own systems and then
uploading them daily?

------
nextstep
Making Megaupload pay this $9000/day seems unfair, too. The US government has
cut off all of Megaupload's revenue streams, and so they would be forcing
Megaupload to keep paying for a service that they can no longer make money
from.

Regardless, why is the cost so high if the server is down? Does this $9000/day
reflect the loss that Carpathia suffers from not re-allocating this storage to
other customers? It would seem to me that given Megaupload's current state, it
would be sufficient to leave the servers powered down and unplugged until the
legal dispute is resolved... surely the cost of leaving a server idle is not
$9000. I don't really know though...

------
neilparikh
Wait, why do they need to keep the power and connectivity on if they are not
being actively accessed? That would same a bunch of money it they were kept
off.

------
joering2
_"and argues that if that data needs to be preserved, someone else—the
government, Megaupload, or an interested party such as the MPAA or EFF—should
bear the costs of preserving the data"_

Fucking exactly!! Have fucking MPAA pick up the tab.

EDIT: its going to be amazing (and will take years for sure) to see if this
won't bite MPAA in the ass if the judge will rule that yes they do have to
pay. Would looove to see that. This should be actually a rule of thumb -- if
MPAA believes someone is infringing, court suit is entirely fine, but you guys
(MPAA) will pay to keep the light on in the meanwhile.

------
rdl
I wonder if this is an opportunity for a startup, and/or an insurance product
sold to SaaS end users, hosting facilities, or developers.

------
nwmcsween
I don't feel one bit of sympathy towards Carpathia, they most likely had all
the warning signs on their door - dmca notices, legal notices and more but
they willingly provided service to a company with garbage morals.

------
dos1
In my mind, the MPAA is certainly the best choice to pay these costs. They're
the ones with the problem, they should be the ones to bear the burden.
Especially considering Megaupload offered to take the data and they explicitly
forbade it. If the MPAA didn't like the solutions offered, but can't come up
with something better, then I think Carpathia should get to do what it wants.

Edit: The opinion above has NO legal basis whatsoever. As many have pointed
out, it's not even legally possible. I made this comment solely from a "In a
perfect world..." standpoint.

~~~
citricsquid
The data is being held (from what I understand) as part of an FBI
investigation. The MPAA may be responsible for the case existing and bringing
the supposed crime to light but the FBI are the people trying the case and
this is beyond the MPAA now. The responsibility lies with the government
agencies.

~~~
stfu
The FBI, as MPAA's minions, should be the ones paying it. Either their
"confiscate" the data or they do not. If they do, they have the responsibility
to keep it up, if they do not, they should have to give it back to its
"owner".

~~~
coderdude
Unwitting puppets perhaps, but I doubt the people of the FBI want very much to
be dealing with copyright drama. That's like fixing bugs in form code to them.
It must feel like a complete waste of their time and talent.

~~~
furyofantares
Then they should choose not to do it.

------
ecaron
At that price, it would only take them 150 days to stop losing money if they
started building some Backblaze servers
([http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-
budget-v...](http://blog.backblaze.com/2011/07/20/petabytes-on-a-
budget-v2-0revealing-more-secrets/)). 25,000TB / 135TB * $7,384 = $1,367,407
minimum cost of commercial hardware to store that much.

"historically and mind-bogglingly large amount of data" - you could say that
again.

~~~
jonknee
Did you read the article at all? They can't lease the equipment to anyone
else, which is what's costing them money. The servers were estimated to be
values at $1.25M, but they are also unable to lease all the space that they
are using, which is significant.

~~~
ecaron
Yes, I get that. That's why I said "stop losing money." It seems like their
only solution would be to transfer the images of the data to cold storage and
then find some source to recoup the cost of the cold storage devices (which is
why I thought the backblaze numbers would be interesting.)

~~~
jonknee
I doubt they are legally allowed to do that. Otherwise it would be a simple
matter of a lot of tape drives.

------
jamespo
Surely it wouldn't take too long to contact both the legitimate users of
Megaupload and ask them to download their totally legitimate files?

