Not necessarily. The reason why torrent seeding is so perilous is because P2P is a privacy nightmare, not because they forgot to say the word "download" in the

Not necessarily. The reason why torrent seeding is so perilous is because P2P is a privacy nightmare, not because they forgot to say the word "download" in the law. If you want to sue people who are copying your work, BitTorrent makes it very easy to get enough information to demand dox from an ISP. For a "mere downloading" case to even occur, you first need to compromise (legally, of course) the host of some direct-download site, subpoena their logs, subpoena a bunch of ISPs, get dox from that, and then sue that class of users. Usually at that point the copying has stopped anyway, which is enough to get a copyright owner to back off. If such a suit were to happen, the argument would probably boil down to where the infringement actually occurred. Does the server infringe when it sends copyrighted material (because that's where the copy is made), or does the client infringe when it requests said material (because they asked for an infringing copy)? Courts might accept both arguments and just decide everyone is liable. Also all of that is for copyright, which (usually) covers published works. Trade secrets, which cover things not ever intended to be published, would just call both sides guilty of "misappropriating" the trade secret.