C|Net News reports that Toshiba will be unveiling a new micro hard drive, about the size of a quarter, next month ( Spare a microdrive, Toshiba? ). The storage capacity is anticipated to be about 1-4 GigaBytes. Hard drives continue to kick Moore's Law 's behind. Any consumer electronics device worth more that about $100 will soon have massive amounts of storage available to it. The advent of such huge amounts of storage everywhere has some important implications of intellectual property law. In particular, it significantly raises the cost of a mandatory DRM dystopia as well as the costs of monitoring for compulsory licensing schemes. Levy compulsory systems that raise money through a tax on consumer electronics and connectivity will be challenged by such rapid development. The digital revolution is far from over. So here is my challenge to compulsory enthusiasts: tell us, in technical detail, how you propose to do the measurements. You don't have to give us working code, but do tell us which programs you would write or modify, and what specifically they would look for. Tell us how you would cope with backward compatibility, and the diverse formats in which people download and store music. Tell us how you would deal with non-PC platforms such as Macs, Linux boxes, and iPods, as well as non-traditional network setups such as public WiFi access points. Ouch. These are some seriously tough issues. Of course, this challenge only really applies to one model of widespread monitoring of all use.