You should generally not pirate, because, to the extent that you (and thus similar beings) would regard it as optimal to pirate, potential creators would not regard it as optimal to locate narrow targets in designspace (whose value comes mostly from its incorporeal component), including those cases where the value of locating these targets exceeds the value forgone in finding them (e.g. labor and other resources expended to find the target).
This conclusion holds even and especially for the case where high-value targets have already been located and became public knowledge (via piracy), and thus your current decision of whether to pirate (to assimilate the target's location) no longer has causal influence on whether the target will be discovered.
The reasoning behind the above conclusion is isomorphic to that of why one should "one-box" in Newcomblike problems, where the decision of whether to provide the (additional) utility has already been made, and any individual's decision to refrain from utility extraction cannot causally influence the decision to provide the utility.
To highly compress and simplify the above reasoning into a human-appealing slogan: "Too much piracy means too little Microsoft Word."
Note: the above reasoning does not mean that all measures to stop piracy, nor any particular one, are optimal, for much the same reason that the general optimality of punishing defectors does not imply the superiority of all possible punishments over non-punishment.
Free software can do things that non-free software cannot. For example it can be copied and run by people who do not have money to spare for software. The practice of licensing software in a way that restricts copying is isomorphic to defection in the prisoner's dilemma: it benefits the individual at net cost to other similar agents.
If I expected all (or almost all) other agents in the marketplace to be similar enough to behave exactly like me, I would pirate software to punish them. That would cause all proprietary software businesses to fail, and only fr...
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?