> they were simple criminals, and not of the ambiguous kind that modern-day copyright 'pirates' are.

Um, no they were the ambiguous kind that modern-day copyright 'pirates' are.

You're clearly confusing Somali Pirates and the Caribbean Pirates of the Golden Age. Pirates were predominantly privateers working under the authorization of a letter of Marque, and at any time could be a pirate to any of the three other major empires in the area.

An English Privateer could be a Pirate to the French, Spanish and Dutch, or just to the Spanish, or they could be a Privateer to the English and Dutch as they were both active against the Spanish. An English Privateer could take a Spanish ship into an allied Dutch port and still receive their payment.

What gets confusing is when a Privateer decided they either wanted to keep the ship, or the treasure or whatever and did so because their capture rightly belongs to the government that issued their letter of marque, or to an allied government.

There was an entire judicial court to decide the fate of captured crew and vessels. Was the letter of marque valid, if yes pay day, if no the privateer could be arrested (remember the Privateer could have been at sea for weeks and landed in a French Port that England was escalating tensions with). Then was the ship and cargo captured of the enemy or not due to the amount of false-flag flying at the time (if you're sailing past a Spanish island you're flying a Spanish flag no matter where you're from).

Privateers had to obey the laws of war, not doing so could result in punishment from forfeiture of the prize, to tort payments for killing/injuring crew members if they were cruel. So if you had to kill 1/4 of a ships crew because you're flying a French flag attacking a Spanish vessel for the English, but the vessel you attacked was Dutch and didn't surrender because they're at war with the French. Are you going to go to port and risk being fined or hung? No you'll go to the mainland and sell to the Americans, or you'll go to a Free Port or a pirate port and let the captured crew swim to shore on whatever island you pass along the way.

Seriously, modern day copyright pirates are much simpler to typify than the Caribbean Pirates were. Copyright pirates today are using technology to treat copyrighted media like Free-to-Air and DVRing it and fast forwarding through commercials. None of the latter is illegal, but the former is. If netflix keeps futurama on it, I can pay $8 a month to watch it or pay $100 for it on DVD. I'm a huge futurama fan, and I paid for DVDs. However I'm a fan of Family Guy, but fuck spending $40 for a new season on DVD, I haven't bought a single season of it on DVD. Fox still gets money from me because I have watched it on Netflix, which is where the copyright pirates argument goes. It's not about stealing, it's about convenience and adoption of modern technology.

I've deleted shows I've pirated because they're on netflix and I'm paying for them. It's more convenient for them to be on netflix as I don't have to fuck around with streaming software. People like convenience, and corporations don't seem to get convenience isn't going to bestbuy and dropping $50 on a new box set to have to put disk after disk into a dvd/blu-ray player just because you wan't something new to watch, but oh you can't return it if you don't like it because you've opened it and it's "digital media" (because apparently DRM isn't supposed to stop you copying it and then returning it, because you can't return it anyway). Yet some people pirate because they simply can't pay and they're not physically stealing anything, and some people pirate because while they like a certain show like anything on Fox, they might disagree with the corporations policies and are trying not to fund them by advertising revenue or buying DVDs, and its certainly a lot more convenient than trawling garage sales and used stores to get used DVDs.

So given the ambiguousness of why copyright pirates plunder and why Caribbean pirates plundered, I wouldn't say we're over-romanticizing the term. Some people are trying to, but it's an aptly ambiguous term to begin with. Also I have a letter of marque to plunder American television programming, so I prefer the term Copyright Privateer.