You start by eschewing the idea of "universal truth" and "morality" in order to show that we don't have the right to act so high-and-mighty, but then you attack us for our "questionable priorities." I can't really figure out your standpoint, unless it's just "What I believe is correct and anybody who holds a contradictory view is immoral."
In the absence of an absolute, we have to deal with what we have, there are people who wish to grant monopolies and claim a moral prerogative, all the while assuming or claiming that the inequalities created are justified. I suggest that those assumptions or claims are faulty.
And yes, I choose to attack priorities that do act high and mighty (good description for the whole general mob outcry, btw) while they ignore the inequalities created and/or bolstered by the very same IP regime which is at issue. Why is that confusing?
We must constantly select intellectual abstractions to guide our reasoning. That becomes more difficult once there is a realization of the lack of clear absolutes (and very difficult if one is originally religious). As coders we're aware better than most that all abstractions are leaky, but they are still valuable.
My specific desire in the discussion for this article is to cause someone who is in the midst of mob furor to question the trade-offs of the IP issue at hand and consider that all this sense of justice may (I say does) create and rationalize more inequalities than we would have otherwise, and either way is utilitarian in its notions (i.e. the greater good, etc) and the people arguing for it may not have considered that and may not actually agree with the full implications of those ideas.
We've got enough actual scarcity, why are we creating more?
[Edit: It's very convenient for artists and artisans (coders, for instance) to feel morally justified, but why are the inequalities created by them in the pursuit of wealth or fame any different than those created by the uber-wealthy? It's all just a bit too self serving.]
[Edit: We have to live in the world we have. Getting the impression that I'm claiming a person should not utilize IP at all is incorrect, it's a whole other thing to light the torches and burn down a house with a smug sense of rightness of a cause, and that's when I think, okay, enough play, you might have to use what we've got to survive, be stable, attempt to find satisfying lives for ourselves and our families, but let's not get too sure of the justice of it all.]
