I didn't mean to avoid your argument. You're of course correct, people who don't have the option of making something sellable might create free things to give away. Or they might not create the thing at all.
To my mind, if the result of eliminating that option is that equally good stuff gets created and distributed for free, that's a win (all else being equal). Conversely, if the result is that there's less good stuff created, that's a lose (all else being equal).
I can't tell if you're actually claiming that the result will be the former. I'm skeptical, myself. But no, I don't have any data I expect you to find convincing. Mostly, I find convincing the number of hours of work I see around me explicitly devoted to doing things in order to earn money, from which I infer that without a profit motive a lot of that work (and the associated things) would not get done. But I don't expect that to be a new datum for you, any more than the existence of wikipedia is a new datum for me, so I don't expect it to convince you.
I could discuss the large scale effects of piracy (copyright infringement) for days! From a game-theoretical/utilitarian -, ethical - or any other perspective. I have a set of views and suggestions for topics that could be interesting to break down and address, but instead of writing a long post addressing many different topics, Ill start with the first one in my mind.
Just a thought:
For a subset of activities you could map the question of the ethical status of illegal downloading of a software p (preferred choice) to the existence of a certain kind of element a in a set S, which I'll call the set of alternatives (assuming the risk of getting caught is very small).
Lets say that you for some reason need a graphics editor and your preferred choice is Photoshop CS5. You could either:
In the case you have chosen to illegally download a copy of the software, some people would compare that to stealing (certainly the folks at Adobe). Would that really be fair to say? At least in my opinion that depends on whether or not you would have bought a copy in the absence of the 'download' alternative. Your preferred choice is indeed Photoshop CS5, but that is one among many choices, the rest being in the set of alternatives S. Most users with illegal copies wouldn't pay the 650$ when there are free alternatives. Those alternatives may be much less attractive with less features but many of them would still do the job.
So if there exist an a in S, such that you would prefer a over p in the absence of alternative 2, then in a game between you and Adobe, the choice a would not be Pareto optimal. Your utility is maximized by choosing p (downloading Photoshop), Adobes utility left unchanged. --> Maximizing total utility (ignoring potential side-effects, such as effects overall attitude towards piracy and so on)
Today there exists an S for almost anything.
Whats your opinion on this in regards to utility maximization (utility of society). Can we really break it down like this looking at the individual case?