American law sets the maximum penalty for pirating a single song at $150,000. Zillow, meanwhile, tells me that five bedrooms and a pool can be had for $142,000 just west of Scottsdale. When Phoenix McMansions can run you less than a filched copy of "My Sharona," some see signs of a looming apocalypse. But I see salvation.

My $249 iPod Classic has room for over 53,000 three-minute songs in immaculate fidelity. Under our anti-piracy laws, that's about $8 billion worth of music. Four years of economic turmoil had left me feeling as impoverished as anyone. But with my $8 billion iPod, I suddenly feel like a plutocrat.

It wasn't always like this. Last Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of the bankruptcy of Napster—the notorious startup that was sued into oblivion with a multi-billion dollar piracy lawsuit. When Napster first launched, the world's hottest MP3 player could hold just 10 songs. That was a measly $1.5 million worth of pirated goods—barely enough for a Greenwich teardown.

As music player capacity has grown, so have the lawsuits. Some were shocked when LimeWire was sued for $7.5 trillion two years ago. That was over ten times the gross revenue that our music industry had racked up since Thomas Edison first filled a 20-ton wax cylinder with an early rendition of “Free Bird” (something that today's scientists can manage with a mere eighty pounds of wax—such is the march of technology).

But my $8 billion iPad has helped me see how silly it is to use market data to evaluate the cost of piracy. Actual value is determined in a bare-knuckled battle of ideas, waged by professional lobbyists and persons-of-congress. That value is then reified in legal brawls with the likes of LimeWire—a virulent menace which wrought damages equal to half of our national debt in a few swift years.

And the problem doesn’t stop at our borders. In 2006, our music industry sued a Russian site called allofmp3.com for $1.65 trillion. While that was penny-ante stuff compared to LimeWire, it represented a shocking 80 percent of Russian GDP. I'd thought Russia had mellowed into a cranky but peaceful peddler of vodka and hockey pucks. But beneath the facade was a rogue website masquerading as a half-continent.

Piracy apologists will dismiss the measures of value reflected in trillion-dollar lawsuits, $8 billion iPods, and our $150,000 piracy law (1999's Copyright Damages Improvement Act). They'll make flimsy claims about the law being "bought" by “media interests” from “senators” who are so rapacious that's they've quite literally lost their sense of the absurd, resulting in laws that are so disproportionate, grasping, and harebrained that they can barely even be parodied.

But I have no time for that sort of cynicism. Laws and the penalties levied for breaking them are unalloyed reflections of a society's priorities. Viewed through this lens, the piracy of a single copy of a single song is roughly 300 times worse than driving drunk in New York state (which carries a $500 maximum fine). That's because while drunk driving can cost lives, music piracy is known to lead to meth addiction, human cannibalism, and societal collapse.

Trillionaire kingpins though they are, today's music pirates are pipsqueaks compared to their eventual successors. Just as our laptop computers surpass their mainframe ancestors in all technical respects, the scale of tomorrow's piracy will one day dwarf even LimeWire's deeds. And as the damages and liabilities mount, language itself could become inadequate to describe the problem's scope. So I propose that we adopt the vocabulary of data storage when discussing digital piracy, as it is uniquely rich when it comes to big numbers.

For instance, as any preschooler can tell you, a billion bytes make a gigabyte, and a trillion make a terabyte. We can likewise say that my iPod holds up to eight GigaDollars worth of music ($8GD), and that LimeWire was sued for 7 TerraDollars ($7TD).

This nomenclature will give us valuable headroom as technology races forward. For instance, should the feds catch every California high schooler filling an iPod Classic with pirated music, they can announce a 16 PetaDollar ($16PD) bust (the petabyte being the next step up the ladder from the terabyte). Should music player capacity meanwhile grow by another factor of a thousand (as it's already done once since Copyright Damages Improvement Act was passed), that would result in a 16 ExaDollar ($16XD) bust.

Should Copyright Damages be Improved further by future laws (and why not—it has been 13 years now, and the prevailing $150,000 penalty hasn't even been adjusted for inflation), we could soon enter the realm of ZetaDollars ($ZD). The biggest denomination of data is the Yottabyte. Its counterpart, the YottaDollar ($YD), is $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.00, which exceeds the world's annual economic output by a factor of several billion. That may sound like a lot—but if present trends continue, content piracy will cost us over a YottaDollar per day by the end of the decade.

Copyright math is heady stuff. But that's why it's best left to experts—like lobbyists and persons-of-Congress.

Rob Reid (@rob_reid) is a novelist, entrepreneur, and music industry expert. He's also a xenobiologist with a specialty in interstellar copyright. His forthcoming science fiction novel, Year Zero, is due out July 11, but he's so desperate for readers that Random House is giving 30 copies away for free at his site this week. Visit Rob's site for more information about his book, a chance to win, and your RDA of snark.