No longer a pirate, not yet a merry man

The Slashdot discussion regarding the Wired News article, "The Shadow Internet," produced interesting comments regarding the whole "piracy" metaphor.
From Slashdotter JeffTL:

As Stallman (Free Software, Free Society; pp. 190-191) said, calling it piracy implies that unauthorized copying is tantamount to armed robbery, kidnap, and murder on the high seas. They both involve theft of a sort -- but are vastly different. Copyright infringement generally involves cheating someone out of their rightful royalties; piracy involves depriving sailors and their employers of life, liberty, or property (maybe all three!) without due process of law. I'd say that copyright infringement is not morally tantamount to this.

From ultranova:

For those who can't tell the difference between real criminal conspiracies and copyright infringers:

* Real criminal conspiracies rob, extort and kill, which directly harms real human beings.
* Copyright infringers distribute music, movies and programs without permission from copyright holders, which may or may not affect the financial bottom line of big media corporations, and might or might not cause their stockholders to not get as much profit as they would otherwise, for an undeterminable amount.

If we go by the nature of the crime, the entire "pirate" metaphor is off, at least in the digital domain. It seems like "Robin Hood" is more accurate. Steal from the rich to give to the poor. One Slashdotter, some guy i know, disagrees:

If you think that you are comparing these "pirates" (i.e., massive copyright violators) with Robin Hood, then you're wrong.
Robin Hood didn't take from the rich and give to the poor; he took from the tax collectors and gave to the taxed.
Now, it turns out that most of the taxed were poor and most of the tax collectors were rich (or those working for the rich), but Robin Hood did not steal from, say, merchants and traders, who were better-off than average, nor did he give to beggars, who were worse-off than average.
Robin Hood should be romanticized because he fought against unfair taxation, not because of the rich-to-poor myth.

But most of the time music labels, not artists, own the copyrights to many songs. They, not artists, are profiting of the musical enterprise. If anything, "merry men," as I'll refer to "pirates" from now on, fight against unfair enforcement of copyright laws. To further the Robin Hood metaphor, illegal music distributors take from the "haves" and give to the "have nots," in this case, the good in question is music, whereas in the Robin Hood mythos, the good was money.