This would be a great topic for Utopia, Dystopia, Weirdtopia
I'll do two versions of the utopia and dystopia.
Utopia 1: Copyright is abolished. Music is produced for a combination of self expression, fame, concert ticket sales, and merchandise sales (merchandise is also largely copyable, but many people buy it from the artist anyway). Movies are mostly crowd-funded through places like kickstarter, some low-budget ones are self-funded initially and then rewarded with donations. Widely used software is mostly open source. Where GPLed software (no longer protected by copyright) is modified and distributed without source by a large company for profit, righteous hackers reverse engineer the program and bad mouth the company publicly, so it's generally seen as not worthwhile. Small GPL violations by individuals are usually ignored.
Dystopia 1: Fair use is abolished, so derivative works can only be produced by the large companies who own the original copyright, or those with permission. Some companies have large copyright portfolios and have an uneasy truce against mutually destructive lawsuits for parodies and occasional references to each other. Positive reviews are often given permission to quote from a work, but negative ones never are. Singing with others present, or playing a CD through speakers instead of headphones, is considered a public performance and requires a license. Letting someone use your e-reader to read your books is forbidden. Sometimes companies sell widely referenced works to copyright trolls who don't publish anything and can freely sue all the other companies who have derivative works without being sued themselves. Anonymous communication on the Internet is banned and putting up an individual website is very expensive, as hosting. General purpose PC's require an expensive permit and monitoring software. iPads and Android devices can only run approved software, and it's much more expensive due to lack of competition and the approval process. Old public domain texts end up effectively owned, as slightly modified versions come into common use, and many key phrases become trademarked after use in advertisements. It goes without saying that Disney's copyrights never expire.
Utopia 2: Copyrights and patents are easy to register and enforce, and micropayments make them easy and convenient to pay for, so most individuals have some registered ideas, jokes, or stories making them at least a little money, without undue burden on the users. Patents have reasonable legal limits on how expensive they can be. Copyrights have voluntary limits on how expensive they can be - overly expensive stuff is ignored and avoided, e.g., many radio stations have a guarantee that any song you hear on their station can be purchased for a reasonable price.
Dystopia 2: the Internet made copyright unenforcable and very few movies and very little music is produced. Most of it is crap. Some is a mixture of good stuff with a just-bearable amount of ads for generic Viagra and fraudulent money-making schemes, somehow made integral to the story. Very little consumer software is produced, though malware is thriving due to common software not getting security updates. Individuals cannot make money from software except through fraud.
ETA - oops, that Utopia 2 may be a weirdtopia for me. The problem is I was trying to come up with a utopia and dystopia from a pro and anti copyright viewpoint, and also Utopia 2 was largely inspired by an sf book I vaguely remember. Possibly by John C Wright.
Where GPLed software (no longer protected by copyright) is modified and distributed by a large company for profit, righteous hackers reverse engineer the program and bad mouth the company publicly, so it's generally seen as not worthwhile.
Note that the GPL does allow you to modify and distribute your program for profit, you just have to release the source code and cannot slap additional restrictions on it. So the sin (contra-normative but legal behavior) in this case would be for the company to sell an obfuscated or compiled version without providing so...
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?