>Essentially, that's what it boils down to. It's a representation of the
>work. Whether representation and copy are the same thing or not I'm not so sure.
What is relevant from a copyright perspective is if it is a copy or not. If it is considered a copy the creation of it (the torrent) or various forms of making it (the torrent) available to the public (may vary between country what exactly is included) can all be infringing acts. If it is not a copy it can't be infringment when you for example copy the torrent. Claiming that information about a work is actually copies of the work seems bizare to me. Claiming that information about how to obtain a work is also a copy of the work is even more bizare.
>Why not? A torrent file has no purpose other that
>to recreate the file from its various pieces.
First of all, not all creation of copies of a work are nessecarilly infringing. Second, the infringment is acts you do with the work, not acts you do with tools that describe a work or tells were the work is.
>Used normally it will recreate the file.
Which is the act that can be, but doesn't have to be, an infringing act.
>If Alice provides Pete with a list of words (a file of all words in English),
>Bob provides Pete with a computer program to decode a data file, and Charlie
>provides Pete with a data file of indices into words.txt to be used with the
>computer program. Combining the three would give you a Harry Potter book.
>Who has infringed copyright?
The one that actually created the copy of the book (for example Pete if he uses all the tools provided to create a copy). Of course, the creation of that book might not at all be an act of infringement to start with, many countries for example allows such copying for private use. It is still the act of creating a copy that can or can not be an infringment.
Of course, your example actually lacks an original copy which is what you in the end copy from dirctly when you go through a torrent file, but still, it is the act of creating a copy that can be an infringment in your example. In the case of torrent files, it is also the one creating a copy (and in addition then ones that makes copies of the work available for you to copy from, at least if we look at Sweden as a case).