Your analogy is completely flawed
By your own reckoning, Mega doesn't have anything unique about its proposition. The proposition might be better than its competitors (50 GB on Mega vs 2-18GB on Dropbox, 5 GB on iCloud, Google and SkyDrive), but essentially it is the same as everybody else, so that begs the question, why is it being singled out by you?
The obvious answer would seem to be that someone paid you to provide this "service", albiet to your paymasters, rather than your readers. If there is another explanation, I am all ears.
Is copying and storage free? No. All of the infrastructure that enables copying and storage doesn't come cheap as is evidenced by the massive datacenters being constructed by the likes of Appel, Google and Microsoft. Is the cost to an individual free? Again, no. An individual might not need to pay for certain levels of service or certain types of products but that doesn't mean that they aren't paying at all. They are paying for their Internet connection. They are generating income for the providers whose products and services they are consuming. They are paying by making money for the service provider. They are what Alvin Toffler might have called a "prosumer".
What is evident to most people is that we are going through a paradigm shift. Knowledge and data used to be trapped in physical objects (cave drawings, manuscripts, books, tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc.) and now it isn't. Knowledge has been freed, because it has been digitized.
This reduction in price is following a well-established trend. Manuscript writers used to be paid silly money equivalent to what Premiership footballers are paid these days. That isn't the case anymore and any manuscript writer who expects to be paid millions of pounds in this day and age for writing out a manuscript will be laughed out of town. It just isn't going to happen. Books came around and made written word cheaper. The same should have been true for e-books, CDs and DVDs too but it didn't happen because of entrenched positions that big media oligarchies enjoy.
What is happening in the digital media space isn't dissimilar to what happened in the 70s with the North Sea oil. The oil was always there but the cost to take it out was too great compared to how cheaply oil was available elsewhere. When the oil-producing companies placed an embargo, that made the North Sea oil affordable to take out.
It's the same story here as well. The pricing model has to change. Everything else around it is changing. The market is changing. People's expectations are changing and what they are willing to pay for this sort of work is also changing. People aren't willing to pay 14-20 quid for an album with one good song in it anymore. The sooner everybody realizes that, the better it is going to be for IP producers.
Look at what's happening in the newspaper industry. Can any newspaper afford to ignore the writing on the wall? If they do, they do it at their peril.
This is the unholy lovechild of Natural Selection and Free Markets. It cannot be stopped.
For your own sake, you should ensure that when the dust settles, you are on the right side of the debate.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
