It sounded to me like the message was supposed to be "it doesn't sound so awesome when you see it from the other side of the looking glass, now does it". (It felt like it was targeted at people who can identify with developing mobile apps)
"The point of the article is that making that choice for someone else is wrong."
It's my feeling that in this article at least, the author does not really care about the rights and wrong of copying, piracy, intellectual property, etc. He is scared by relatively few people on the internet being both lawmaker, judge, party and executioner when it comes to the monetization of a digital product, and the reason why he is scared is that these few people are not even potential customers.
The problem of someone taking copyrighted content and making it available for others is a small one. The big problem is the many millions of people who take advantage of it. If everyone recognized that they're not entitled to anything except their basic human rights, none of which have anything to do with access to MP3s, then others posting that content online wouldn't matter.
The hope with this article was a little empathy from a community that often leans toward not caring about copyright law as it pertains to music. While many chose to go the route of poking tiny holes in parts of the analogy, plenty didn't realize it was an allegory and talked about how messed up it was. Many of them the same people who fight music copyright tooth and nail.
It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for them. It's short sighted and will result in fewer people having the time to become experts in these crafts, which is a loss for everyone. Sure, quantity is at an all time high, but in art that hardly matters.
We need to figure out fair solutions to these time & money issues in order to void the piracy problem and make devs and artists feel better. In the mean time, well... there are concerts, donations, advertisement, register-only services, drm... crappy stuff(1) compared to the real deal if you want my opinion (that of an independent android app dev), but eh, tough times.
(1)except concerts. Live music is awesome. Horribly expensive and probably really hard to setup, but extremely enjoyable.
Precisely. Many millions of people take advantage of it, and the overall good is greater than if they didn't. If the cost of distributing some good falls down to zero, you can't make a living by distributing these. Find another way; for instance provide a web service through your app, that unregistered copies can't access.
> It's just sad to think that everybody enjoys music, just like they enjoy software, and so many other things that can be easily taken, and yet don't care if the people who create it see enough benefit to keep making it for them.
For the tremendous majority of professional musicians recorded music never represented a significant source of revenue at all, if ever. Most musicians get paid for playing, and nothing else. That people swap mp3 around have absolutely no influence on their life -- except when it helps them getting known.
People already use lack of easy access as their excuse for piracy. Now you want them to make some hard to crack app just for people to be able to listen to it? How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?
And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.
If you swallow a cost of 10, but that 11 people gets 1 from your contribution, the society as a whole wins.
> How about people just stop taking what's not theirs and treat artists with respect?
When something that used to be hard becomes totally simple, obvious and costless, there is absolutely no sense trying to stick to the previous state of the matter. When Gutenberg invented the printing press, what used to be a complex, tough and expensive endeavour (copying books by hand) instantly became worthless. Too bad, but the net gain for the society as a whole was immense.
Similarly, the net gain we could enjoy from being able to copy, transfer, duplicate, mix, rehash, transform existing digital goods is world-changing. Some will lose at some point, but they'll have to get over it. Nowadays large parts of the copyright laws are only manacles impending progress, defending soon to be dead practices and business models.
> And in regard to your last statement, it's not your right to determine whether exposure alone should be the reward of their hard work.
Did you read me? As a musician composer and arranger, I've earned a living by teaching and live performance, but a net loss on recordings; and it was back in the 90s, when CD-R was unheard of.
The hard true fact : only artists aired on radio and TV make money on recorded music. They are a minuscule minority of musicians. Same goes for actors, painters, etc.
It sounds to me like you're saying "so long as society sees a net gain, it's ok to exploit other people"
Those wanting the crash-course could start with the very real difference between actual human rights and artificial privileges. They could continue their educations by developing some appreciation for the (very substantial differences) between tangible and intangible goods. And they could demonstrate their commitment to civil society by NOT supporting the development of law in ways that would - inevitably - lead to an astonishingly omniscient police state.
And that's not something that any artist worth the name would be okay with.