Ok, you're probably right. It wasn't "the reason". It was part of the discussion at the time though.
"By simply banning ports, we get rid of abuse of content hosted by our IPs via ports, and can focus on giving better privacy for the broader mass of people," said Jonsson.
He said: "Statically linked port-forwards are not good for privacy, it can be linked to a user account. A VPN service that can identify a user, is not a good option for using port-forward with, if anonymity is important."
If you're amazingly talented and spend 10 years of your life building something amazing but have no money, when someone offers you millions you're just gonna take it.
Because people want to watch from some other location?
People with little or no technical knowledge just want to buy a cheap camera, turn it on, scan a QR code or something and then be able to watch their dog being bored at home from the comfort of their office in the city or some such.
Life is so much easier when you just assume that the cheap junk you buy has your best interests in mind.
There's also a handful of users on other instances that love bashing the dems for not being left enough or something. These are just a few nutters, not really moderators pushing agendas.
I think there's a variety of complex legal, political, and technical reasons why torrent sites can avoid having their domain "seized", but I think the summary is: there be dragons here and it's not worth playing around with.
Politically, some jurisdictions define piracy differently and hosts won't comply with legal threats from the US.
Legally, hosting a torrent is not the same as hosting a ROM. In the former case the actual copyright works are hosted by users, the torrent site just hosts the torrent file which is a list of users from whom you can download the content. ROM sites tend to provide the actual file for download, which contravenes relevant copyright laws.
Technically, you don't need a commercial host platform to operate a website. It's entirely possible to host a site in your mum's basement on your laptop. Obviously for a large site you'll want more appropriate hardware but the point is larger torrent sites are likely to run on hardware maintained directly by the admins.
The most compelling reason not to get involved in a public facing grey area site like ROM or abandonware hosting, is that it doesn't really matter where you stand with the law - you won't have the resources to defend yourself. Suppose Nintendo decides they don't like you doing what you're doing. They have an army of sophisticated lawyers who have spent a lifetime learning how to weaponise the law. It doesn't really matter who's "right", all that matters is how much money you have with which to engage lawyers to defend yourself.
I think its great that countries are excluding themselves on this basis.
However, im not surprised that the contest has remained agnostic and that israel has not withdrawn.