"...software developers do own their own product, the fruits of their labors. Owning something means restricting other people's rights to use it in a particular way and allowing other people to use it in a particular way, for the most part at the discretion of the owner."

The problem with this statement is that software developers do not own the product once they have sold it. If they burn it onto a CD and you pay money for that CD then you own it. What they own is the copyright, which to me means that they own the right to claim credit for the work, and to charge for reproductions of it. You have paid for one such copy however, and that copy is yours to do with as you please within the confines of moral behaviour.

"The developer would not have put in the hours to develop the product if others could simply use his product without paying for it. Stealing software is immoral for the same reason that stealing labor (slavery) is immoral. People properly own the fruits of their own labor, unless someone compensates them for their time."

You are simply repeating the flawed analogy of "copyright violation is theft" without justifying it. In fact you attempt to reinforce it with the even more inaccurate assertion that "copyright violation is slavery". Forcing someone to work is slavery (whether you pay them or not). However not paying someone for work they do voluntarily is not slavery, and is only immoral if you agreed beforehand that you would pay them for it.

You are not stealing their labour because with intellectual property, the fruits of that labour can be recycled infinitely. Steal as many copies as you want, and they still have an infinite supply. Forget for a minute whether copyright violation is right or wrong, the point here is that it is not anything like slavery, and it is not anything like theft.

"By respecting intellectual property rights, Alan is defending the moral principle that coercing people into giving up the products of their labor is wrong."

Where is the coercion? This is yet another metaphor in lieu of an argument. Nobody is trying to make software developers give their software away for free, on the contrary it is they who are trying to make others not give it away.

Software developers are perfectly entitled to use any morally legitimate means to control the distribution of their software, whether it be through copy protection schemes, competitive pricing and distribution, or legal action against those who cause them actual (provable, calculable) harm.

The point of the article was that the harm caused by philanthropic (free) redistribution has been massively overestimated, and the legal penalties for such actions are wildly disproportionate, and must be heavily clamped down to prevent publishers abusing the legal system to recoup outrageous fines from the few pirates they manage to catch and make examples of. They cannot be allowed to blame poor sales on pirates and then expect the pirates to pay the difference - pirates for the most part just supply software to those areas of the market unwilling to pay for it, and they do no calculable harm by doing this because most users of pirate software would not have paid for it anyway.

The way they get away with fining pirates for more than they've taken is by using the "theft" metaphor to imply that pirates selling copies is like them stealing them off the shelf. But that's not true - the pirates aren't manufacturing wealth from nothing - software is not a money tree. If you copy a CD full of valuable data then together those two identical CDs have exactly the same value as the first one (plus the miniscule cost of the media). The same is true of 10, or 100, or a 1000 copies. You cannot steal or devalue intellectual property in that way - you cannot increase or reduce its worth by duplication.

The true value of intellectual property is the number of people willing to pay for it, multiplied by the amount they are willing to pay. A pirate is no more likely to influence those numbers than a magazine reviewer is.