The people who download illegally are breaking laws aren't they? That does in fact make them lawbreakers and criminals. My point however was virtually everybody breaks laws at some point in their lives, and as such probably should be less willing to so easily throw people under the proverbial bus for breaking laws because they personally don't like what they did. Just because someone broke a law doesn't mean they no longer have human rights, which is something you should be grateful for if you've ever done something illegal.
Backpedaling with 'well some laws are worse than others to break' is problematic. It ceases to become an issue of law and becomes one of simple personal opinion. What if the murderer is in prison for murdering a child molester? The vast majority of people in prison have a reason for what they did and a long chain of circumstances that got them to that point, many flat out need mental health care, there are not vast numbers of mentally stable mass murders and mass rapists who did those things just because they're bad people just sitting around (my country of 30 million people currently has exactly two of those type imprisoned that I can think of), and even if there were those people are still entitled to human rights.
What happens in your scenario when we run out of those type of people to test on? Do we then move on to illegal downloaders because they too are criminals? Where's a line to define that which is not entirely arbitrary?