Modern pirates are economically disenfranchised people (usually sustinance fishermen) that have had their livelihoods stolen by international conglomerates.
Even with the the murders, etc, they are multiple steps up the ethical food chain from slaver fishing ships, which are apparently totally legit businesses (TM) in the global economy.
I really don't see the problem with the term "piracy". I guess if you are a vegan and also 100% boycott Asia you might be able to cast a stone against 21st century pirates.
> This site really isn't news for hackers, either...
I would consider this actually to be a serious point. Indeed there exist people who complain that the focus of Hacker News has shifted from what it was in the past.
I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two. Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to talk about how the community has changed, typically in a derogatory manner.
This is perfectly explainable: Very often, early adaptors of, say, communities are a very different breed of people than people who join the community in a later phase.
So, it is the behaviour to expect that sooner or later these early adaptors that lead to the initial growth of the community won't feel home anymore.
There's that, and there's also the tendency for humans to feel nostalgia for a time that never was. Memories are poor. I suspect if people were asked to guess whether a thread was from today or 2008, they'd get a lot wrong (aside from chronological details giving clues).
You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe copyright theft.
Just because some clever PR campaign launched by the copyright lobby succeeded in equating harmless act of copying files to a violent dangerous crime, it doesn't mean we should perpetrate forever this substitution of concepts.
Because the main source of ire of book authors is that they lose some part of the revenue from book sales due to copyright infringement, which many call piracy.
Now, piracy is an incorrect and am emotionally charged term to describe this phenomenon. I believe that a productive discussion on any matter requires clarity of chosen terms. Piracy is not one such term when talking about something not related to sea and ships.
Piracy is a violent penal crime that often results in murder and property theft. Copyright infringement we are talking about is just copying digits.