Last week, we reported that a staggering 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Now, engineer Craig Mansfield has worked out how much it would cost per year to pre-screen all that video for copyright infringements — and the answer is close to that of Google’s annual revenue.
Mansfield calculated that a team of 199,584 judges — or equally qualified individuals — would be required to watch and rule over the video, which in turn would cost $US36,829,468,840. For comparison, Google’s revenue for 2011 was $US37,905,000,000.
Even if it were possible to find a cheaper labour source, the costs would still be astronomical. If you’re interested, you can read his working in detail. [Craig Mansfield via TechDirt]
Image: Rego – d4u.hu/Flickr