The attacks on torrent sites have little to do with headlines and more to do with the reality that they are critical points in the distribution of information people don't want shared.

To many people the distinction you point out is meaningless.

"Thousands of scientific papers torrented at The Pirate Bay"

'torrented at' seems to be emerging as the favoured idiom denoting the hosting of a torrent file.

" a .torrent file pointing to thousands of scientific papers has just been uploaded to the pirate bay" doesnt really fit into a headline

"Thousands of scientific papers were shared via The Pirate Bay"

This is still pretty misleading. TPB only hosts the .torrent file, they don't have any of the contents of the files being shared. They don't even run a tracker anymore! Any method of distributing a small file to a large number of people would have worked in the exact same way. The only thing TPB has that (e.g.) Google Docs doesn't is mindshare.

Yes, I agree. I guess the problem lies in mentioning The Pirate Bay in the first place. The facilitator is unimportant.

It's like saying that the documents were mailed via TNT.

They don't run a tracker anymore?! Are they using other people's trackers or just the DHT feature?

The .torrent file can list multiple trackers. If it includes TPB's old trackers, connections will fail but the DHT and other trackers usually manage just fine. In fact, TPB said that trackers are obsolete ("not up-to-date") and that everyone should just use DHT and peer exchange (PEX) instead of relying on centralized trackers from now on. Some people still use trackers, but it's not really necessary.

Yes.

"A way to get thousands of scientific papers on The Pirate Bay"

Awkward.