I think the older use should prevail. It was there first. The later reversed definition came about due to a misunderstanding.
For me, the terms are only valid if one knows the location of the User, or the Observer as Einstein called it in his Theory of Relativity. In other words, the terms are relative to the location of the observer. Whether it is an Upload or a Download for a specific device depends on your position relative to that device (at or near Device 1, or Device 2).
Knowing your location as the "user" or "observer" doesn't help. It all goes pear-shaped when you are neither "at", nor "near to" either device.
The situation today is that all sorts of data transfers, program updating, making backups, etc., can be controlled from just about anywhere on the network, and that network could be the internet, so anywhere in the world.
Location of the "observer", therefore, is not something that you can set your yard-stick by.
Inferring the data-transfer direction by the relative size of the "machines" has also been discounted.
The very fact that this debate continues, is that the terms UPLOAD and DOWNLOAD, are inherently arbitrary, meaning that some other information is needed to convey the most important thing -
direction. UP and DOWN has no meaning !!
Back to basics....
1. Two devices transfer data....
2. One is sending, the other is receiving...
3. We do not know the relative size/power of the two devices..
4. We initiated this data transfer remotely..
a: Are both devices taking part in a Download ?
b: Are both devices taking part in an Upload ?
c: Is one of the devices doing a Download, and the other an Upload ?
The only thing we can state with
100% certainty is that one device is
sending the data, and the other is
receiving it.
Upload and Download can be interpreted either way, and they are just poor names given by the people who designed/wrote the spec. and the software.
Never should a user have to consider their "position" in any "pecking order", to determine whether they should Upload or Download to send something to another device... it's wrong, and can lead to the ambiguity that so many have come across.