12 TB Of Contention

In the ongoing $1 billion legal lawsuit between YouTube and Viacom, a federal judge has recently ordered Google to turn over records of all users and videos ever viewed on YouTube. Privacy concern aside, that’s 12 terabytes of data. It sounds enormous because it is...but what exactly does 12 terabytes-worth of information look like (other than simply describing my downloaded pron and music)? To help you visualize the magnitude of that volume of data, check this chart:

12 terabytes of data are roughly equivalent to:

- 5,280,000,000 single-spaced typewritten pages
- 1, 006,633 phone books
- 19,358 regular compact discs
- 2,614.5 DVDs
- 61.4 average-sized hard disks (200 GB)
- 9.6 human brains (the capacity of a human being’s functional memory is estimated to be 1.25 terabytes by futurist Raymond Kurzweil in The Singularity Is Near)
- all the data from Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope

It's not clear regarding the details of the legal order, but if information is information, then Google should just hand over the data in 5 billion sheets of single-spaced typewritten page. That'll learn those Viacom dicks!