Comment by nativeit

I haven't really seen this point made elsewhere, but as I understand one of the more salient features of bittorrent is that peers are actively sharing the portions of a file they have downloaded. "Seeding" only refers to those who have the entire file and continue to share it, but all peers who are downloading the file are generally sharing the pieces of it they have while the rest downloads.

They could throttle their upload bandwidth, but if they were doing that to the extent that they could plausibly argue they hadn't distributed any of the content, I think they would have said so, and I think it would be a stronger argument than using lingo to merely suggest it (especially when the lingo doesn't imply what they say it does).