I'm not convinced that we are a vocal minority when it comes to piracy. I think that many, many people act in the way described in his post. And that more do so every day.
The same could be said with gamers, though they are a little more prone to piracy. What's with the author's Steam hatred? Do people still do that? (Soooo 2005, guys) What is there to hate about Steam when nearly every other media platform is worse? Steam is leaps and bounds better than the competition, AND it supports indie devs fairly, AND its got some pretty cool features, AND everyone still gets paid.
Yes we geeks want unprotected super duper high quality downloads that we can transcode to 80,000,000 devices in a billion different formats. We want these things because we're nerds. Most people aren't nerds, and they don't care. Ours is a quixotic fight with unreasonable (at this time) demands, and totally undeserving of the relentless sense of entitlement we seem to feel towards it.
We're forgetting that, in the end, this is all about entertainment. Not poverty, not starvation, not joblessness. Just entertainment -- diversions, mostly. There's a million ways to entertain oneself, and most of them don't involve Big Content.
Think about the pricing of HDMI cables. You and I both know you can pick them up on Amazon for $7. But Best Buy charges $50. There is no real difference.
Why doesn't Best Buy charge $10 or something like that? They are literally ripping people off.
Let's say that the cost to Best Buy is $5. If they charge $10, they make $5 each. If they sell it for $50, they make $45 each.
Obviously a lot of people will just order it online. But when you are making 9x the profit for each one, you can lose 80% of the people and still come out ahead.
So they can make albums cost $2 and hopefully capture 100% of all people, or they continue charge $10 and lose some people. Again, as long as they're not losing 80% of people, they are coming out ahead. And I'm not convinced that at $2 you would get 100% of people.
Or on Monoprice for $1 ;)
For most people the attitude is closer to "I can get it for free so I'll take it shrug"
But real people get annoyed with them the first time it hits them (like UBISofts DRM servers going down, or realising they can't take their Kindle books to a different book reader).
It's quite hard to convince people that it really is important to maintain some ability to control their own computing devices even if they have no intention of directly doing so themselves.
I often think that climate scientists must have similar problems.