It's funny how I can be so confident about MegaUpload's intent to infringe copyright. It's almost as if I had some magic ability to quote actual internal emails in which their own employees stated that the majority of their video content was infringing.
Ok, you being tptacek I'll trust that's a fact :) Even though I really wonder why you'd have seen their internal emails (??). Still there's two things (and they both could be true):
First there's the possibility that MegaUpload has no duplicate checking at all, meaning that if anyone would upload the exact same data they would just store it twice. Or thrice. That way I suppose they could get to the 25 petabyte mark.
Second, you say "majority of their video content". I can believe that too. That is, the whole "it's 25 petabyte" argument goes nowhere if we're just discussing a part of the data.
Then all I'm saying is, even if they're storing all possible MPAA protected data, in several formats and encodings, it's still a tall order to claim that involves more than a couple percent of those 25 petabytes, and taking it all offline just because a small part of it is infringing (even if that small part is rather huge), isn't quite fair. It'd be like taking the Internet offline because people are doing illegal stuff on it, right?
You won't even get to a terabyte if you sum those 20.