I would certainly assume so. It's incredibly obvious that's what you would want to do from a legal standpoint.
> If only one employee was also seeding ... that could be a very interesting case.
The torrenting wouldn't be done casually by employees acting on their own. And it's not like multiple employees are doing it simultaneously, unsupervised, on their personal computers.
This is part of an official project. They'd spin up a machine just to download the torrent, being careful to disable seeding.
This is Meta. They have lawyers involved and advising. This isn't a teenager who doesn't fully understand how torrenting works.
There should be a problem with stuff obtained through illegal means, even if having that stuff is in principle legal. In this case, copyrighted material.
Obviously they would argue that having the data is only a consequence of the download part, and that part is legal. What I see is that these situations are always complicated, and if you're rich enough, you get to litigate the complications and come out with a slap on the wrist or maybe even clean hands, while if you are an ordinary citizen, you can't afford to delve into the complexities and get punished.
These days I'm starting to give up on the whole concept of the legal system being fair. They're not even pretending anymore.
