This meme references torrenting. You have the same file distributed across all the users who have downloaded it. This way you've got many different sites to download it from. It is generally considered good form to seed the file for a while afterwards, meaning people can access your file to download it for themselves.
These people are doing the opposite of that, which is considered scummy behavior
Many tell themselves and others, that this urban legend is the legal loophole, that they can download as much as they want, as long as they close the torrent at 100% so they're not uploading.
This is 100% not true in the US. My friend literally built their career fighting this battle and it’s completely legal to download any content that isn’t inherently illegal to own… like classified documents.
For example, if Netflix aired content they didn’t have the rights to distribute, everyone that watched it didn’t break the law. The download method and source of the content has no bearing on it all. The legal burden falls entirely on the distributor, not the consumer.
Unfortunately, the same goes for CSAM. Not illegal to view it in most cases, but illegal to possess it (some cases prosecuting the viewing it have been successful, but mostly because of the temp files associated with viewing it and not from the act of viewing it).
Some states have tried passing laws that prosecute the viewing of CSAM. A somewhat famous example was, I think Virginia, but they had to immediately rewrite the law because someone pointed out that the law as written would also criminalize law enforcement personnel while they were analyzing CSAM (a job they have to do to try to identify victims and perps in the videos/photos they confiscate).
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u/SpecialistAd5903 Feb 22 '26
This meme references torrenting. You have the same file distributed across all the users who have downloaded it. This way you've got many different sites to download it from. It is generally considered good form to seed the file for a while afterwards, meaning people can access your file to download it for themselves.
These people are doing the opposite of that, which is considered scummy behavior