This article, and the Oatmeal comic which inspired it, are great, but they could have been written a decade ago, if one replaced Game of Thrones with Kid A and "BitTorrent" with "Napster". (Ten years ago, Napster had already been shut down for seven months. How time flies.)
We've had this discussion, had it again, printed it on T-shirts and coasters. Apple went and instantiated this concept in the music industry, and made billions of dollars in the process, and even that is old news now.
The sad thing about Marco's argument is that it's not only right, but it applies to itself. Being correct feels great, and it certainly helps, but it's not the same thing as making progress.
Of course in the goods economy you had a cost of making the item, sure there was R&D and advertising Etc. but each good also has some raw materials so you really can't sell them below a certain price or you lose your shirt.
In the information economy you get this weird artifact. Your 'good' gets copied and distributed without remuneration. This appears to be lost sales, but in fact it is simply that your good is priced outside the demand curve for those buyers. What is even stranger is that you can lower your price all the way to zero if you choose because the marginal cost to make a new one is zero. This gives you tremendous pricing leverage in the info economy and people who use it well typically price high for novelty value early, then lower to capture the larger market, and then lower still to pick up the remnant market. The cost of R&D, marketing, etc can be amortized over all of these and if you look at it as an integral value function you can actually make reasonable pricing decisions.
Of course old school media doesn't get the 'info' economy any more than telling a teenager that the 'fair' price is one that someone will pay even if they think it is too high.
Over time these concepts are making themselves known in the mainstream but it does take waaaay more time than it does to innovate so it seems like its not changing at all.
What's really happening is that, the easier piracy becomes, the closer the supply curve comes to turning into a very flat line at price 0. Now, the actual cost to the consumer in time, energy, bandwidth, and guilt is higher than 0, and it's possible to reduce those costs by trading off some actual money cost to get the permission of copyright holders the way Apple or Rdio are doing, but it's not clear that this will last forever.
Such a structure consumes a scarce resource -- creative effort -- wastefully, and restricts an abundant resource -- communicability of information -- unnecessarily. That seems very much the opposite of economically efficient.
Information goods should be more like better kinds of software production. But the current copyright-based system makes it all more like a 'waterfall economy'
The "isn't worth it" actually goes the other way at this point: it's isn't worth pirating anything you can get from iTunes. Most of their customers are perfectly capable of pirating stuff, but it isn't worth their time compared to grabbing it from iTunes.
I'm not saying nobody will ever compete with them or that people don't still pirate anyhow, just that they're more than capable of competing with free. They've been successfully doing that the entire time, in fact.
That's exactly the part that makes me believe they have staying power.
I've upvoted your comment to help ensure that won't be the case.
My other comment being close to the top of the thread at the moment, I'm sorry to have addressed the door design aspect rather than Marco's main point, it's indeed not as interesting a topic for discussion. I might learn something about fire safety today, though. And I'm confident HN voters will make sure there's no derailment.
I find it interesting to read these various clever technical solutions for the same problem, even so mundane as "users don't want to touch the doorknob on the way out". As long as they acknowledge it is a problem and don't get into the moral argument about what ought to be.
Some of the ways in which this issue can be addressed may have analogs in the problem space actually being addressed.
Or as so many people have put it, forgiveness is often easier than permission.
To make the entire thing even more fun, I've actually worked in an office that had relatively strict sanitary requirements (the office contained some food testing labs), and opening the door with a paper tower was obligatory. Didn't stop the management from putting the basket on the other side of the bathroom.
I may actually care about the described issue in restroom context more than in piracy context. But then again, my most common download is books.
But we can still make poop jokes, right?
I like those really tall faucets, the ones used by surgeons when they scrub in. I want one in my office restroom, so that I can easily wash up to my elbows after a messy coding session, and I don't care to listen to the moralists who tell me that those faucets are only for surgeons.
Of course, if you used those examples instead of a silly example about designing an office restroom, the HN thread gets derailed by people talking about economics or HIV. One could criticize the HN community for that kind of bikeshedding, but it's more pragmatic to just use a boring, contrived example to sell the point. Certainly, a HN thread won't end up filled with a side discussion about office restroom design.