Good question.
I can't deny that I was hoping/expecting to see the results that I got, and I did attempt to put a favorable spin on even some results which could have been interpreted as unfavorable. But on the other hand, I did also honestly report the disfavorable results, and I had arrived at this position because I'd seen a bunch of similar evidence before I started writing the book. I had been a proponent of strong copyright enforcement before, until I read an early draft of Against Intellectual Monopoly which made me drastically revise my view. If the evidence had been completely unlike what I'd expected, I would have been honest about it and revised my view again.
Also, some of the evidence I found before and during the writing process made me revise my position about commercial copyright away from the official party line. At the time of writing, the Finnish Pirate Party - which I was the spokesman of - officially advocated limiting the duration of commerical copyright to 5-10 years from the creation of the work. I became increasingly convinced that it would be better to either have a duration of 15 years or a two-stage scheme. The two-stage scheme would involve a very brief commercial monopoly, followed by an extended period during which others could resell or build on the original work without acquiring permission from the original creator, but still had to pay royalties for it. Either way, non-commercial use, including file-sharing, would be permitted from day one.
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?