The difference between copyright infringement and stealing is that copyright infringement does not deprive the owner of his own copy, this being a really important feature of digital goods (btw, I'm not saying here that copyright infringement should be legal).
On the issue of downloading/uploading - that's just a technical detail that's being hidden away in modern protocols and clients, such as BitTorrent. When downloading torrents, everybody is an uploader.
I can see a clear difference here between a user that just wants to download some movie he likes and somebody that makes money out of it, or somebody that's interested in "sticking it to the man".
Just as when committing murder there's a big difference between something premeditated and something done by negligence. The difference is that of intent.
The data by itself has no meaning, unless interpreted.
So the question should be, did the user have any intent on sharing/distributing the creative work to others, or was he just a user of a protocol he didn't understand, ending up uploading just because that's how the protocol works?
A lot of non-technical users do not know that they are uploaders when using BitTorrent. They just have a client installed by a friend and upon clicking a link the download begins, just as it would through HTTP or FTP.
And I see a clear distinction here between somebody doing that, or somebody that does it for the money or for glory. For instance we have a lot of prowlers in my city that sell pirated CDs at street corners to people that are passing by. The PirateBay is also filled with movies shot with a web cam in a movie theater, done with the express intent to redistribute those movies, either for money or for the thrills. Many times movies that were distributed as press releases end up on the PirateBay in DVD-quality long before the DVD was released. A lot of hacked copies of Windows are also on the PirateBay, many times with customizations and mallware included. And so on.
There are many shades of gray here. You can't put all the people in the same bucket. And I think that the people that should get punished are those that start the redistribution chain in the first place, not kids, not grandmas, and not the online services that act as the middleman (many times without their knowledge).
This is another reason why I think DRM is a misguided and broken attempt to fix piracy, when watermarking is so much better from all points of view.
On the issue of downloading/uploading - that's just a technical detail that's being hidden away in modern protocols and clients, such as BitTorrent. When downloading torrents, everybody is an uploader.
I can see a clear difference here between a user that just wants to download some movie he likes and somebody that makes money out of it, or somebody that's interested in "sticking it to the man".