The preferred method of pirating music has long been to rip and release whole albums at a time, but with fast broadband and BitTorrent, pirate releases are getting bigger and bigger. Here are some of the files offered up on The Pirate Bay right now:

The History of Rock & Roll 1956-1977 (Bill Drake) - 6.12 GiB
Alphabet of Pop Part 2 of 26 The Letter B (Archived) - 6.32 GiB
Carry On Collection - 18.07 GiB
MASH - The Complete Collection - 44.75 GiB

These are truly huge files, but they are clearly the future. It’s only a matter of time, storage, and bandwidth before we see the Ultimate Record-Pirate Download:

music.zip - 3.24 PiB

I’m guessing at the size, since I haven’t seen this file in the wild (yet). It will be followed shortly by movies.zip at, say, 106 PiB.

At current trends, this nightmare end-game for the content industry will become reality in about 20 years. To stave off defeat, the powers that be must impose their own nightmare end-game on the consumer: a digital police state where every electronic device is monitored and scanned for infringing content.

These two end-games are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

I boldly predict that no person, corporation, or government will be able to completely destroy the general purpose computer; there will always be hackers who can get a FLAC decoder to run on their toaster’s CPU. I also predict that music.zip will live inside an even larger file, steganographically encoded to prevent detection by the authorities (who will be unable to properly lock down your computer, but who will always be able to bust down your front door).

So what kind of legitimate cover file will people use to hide their dodgy music in? I further, and finally, predict that in the future, a lot of people will carry with them on their cellphones a petapixel image of their cat.