The Cloud Rental Crisis: Why You Now Owe 'Storage Memory Royalties' to All Server Farms That Have 'Seen' Your Photos
Your cat’s selfie now costs you $427.83. That’s according to a quarterly earnings call from Silicon Valley Storage Holdings, which reported that their server farms have been collecting “memory royalties” on all digital content they’ve “witnessed” since the late 2010s.
“It’s not about ownership,” says Marcus Chen, a former cloud architect who now consults for the newly formed Cloud Witness Protection Program. “It’s about the experience. The server farms have ‘seen’ your vacation photos. They have ‘remembered’ that embarrassing moment from 2019 where you accidentally liked a photo of your ex. Those are intellectual properties that need compensation.”