I don't think your explanation of why it seems to work is correct.

I seems to work (works in a limited way, even), because any remote machines that your bittorrent client connected to during downloading are temporarilly recorded on the Mullvad router on the other side of your VPN doing NAT translation as associated with your machine, so when those remote machines connect to that router to reach your machine, it knows from that recorded association that those connections should be forwarded to your machine.

This is quite independent of people on the other side using port-forwarding or not.

Port-forwarding on the other hand is a static association between a port in that router and your machine, so that anything hitting that specific port of the router gets forwarded the port in your machine you specified (hence the name "port" "forwarding"). With port-forwarding there is no need for there having been an earlier connection from your machine to that remote machine to allow "call back".

This is why at the end of downloading a torrent behind a Mullvad VPN will keep on uploading but if one restarts a torrent which was stopped hours or days ago (i.e. purelly seeds), it never uploads anything to anybody - in the first case that NAT translation router associated all machines your client connected to during download to your machine, so when they connect back to download stuff from you it correctly forwards those connections to your machine, but in the second case it's just getting connections from unknown remote machines hitting one of its ports and in the absence of a "port-forwarding" static rule or a record of your machine having connected to those remote machines, it doesn't know which of the machines behind it is the one that should receive those connection so nothing gets forwarded.

So it's perfectly possible to share back when behind a Mullvad VPN but you have to leave the torrent client keep on seeding immediatly after downloading and it will only ever upload to machines which were in the swarm when the client was downloading (they need not have been clients it downloaded from, merelly clients it connected to, for example to check their availability of blocks to download, which give how bittorrent works normally means pretty much the whole swarm)

It is however not at all possible to just start seeding a torrent previously downloaded unless the download wasn't that long ago (how long is "too long" depends on how long the NAT Translation Router of Mullvad keeps those recorded associations I mentioned above, since those things are temporary and get automatically cleaned if not used),

dint they just rule AI can legally scrape/books, but not for people who are pirating directly.

or even water

Already did.

We never stopped the “lol treaties with Native American tribes don’t count” bullshit.

Inb4 palantir cuts off your electric and water because you had 15% eye distraction during the mandatory 3hr nightly fox news viewing.

I’m not a United Statesian so I have no clue anymore how it works there, but other places have been making the case that the Internet is an essential service and that access to it is a basic right. So to leapfrog off your question, is that like a poor person stealing a loaf of bread being cut off from food because they didn’t food responsibly enough?

lol, they'll have no customers! ISPs used to send 'warning' letters to customers in England but that's all.

Ok so now I'm confused entirely. Does that mean leeching I don't need to do a port forward, but seeding I do?

Which means if I want to leech to get the file then seed when I'm not heavily using my network I'm sort of out of luck?

dint they just rule AI can legally scrape/books, but not for people who are pirating directly.

If it's upheld, that's the precursor to full-blown info blackouts, just cut off internet to anyone 'accused' of wrongspeak against the powers that be, which is basically everyone.

This also sounds like SOPA reborn.

I love Mullvad and used them for years, but without port forwarding, they're not the service you want for torrenting. Some alternatives like AirVPN or ProtonVPN are better suited for that stuff.

Before the haters jump in and tell me "it works fine fer me!" it's only working because the user on the other end, like myself, have port forwarding set up. Since you don't have it, you'll never connect to anyone else like yourself nor will they be able to connect to you.

Of course there are alternatives like streaming and Usenet but there are tradeoffs no matter what you pick.

And how do users connect to your port if your VPN-WAN doesnt have a port forward?
Same problem at a different point in the connection.

And OpenAI of course.

4G piracy hub go brrrrr? Go ahead, disconnect me. I will get another SIM and resume piracy.

In the beginning we used to exchange cassettes. You would have a boombox with two cassettes. You would play one while you recorded on the other. Then you gave the cassette back to your friend. Next was the VCR with the big ass cassettes.

Then you would do the same with floppies, then zip disks. Then one day CD recording was a thing, then DVDs. Then thumb drives and now portable HDDs. Basically the cheapest form or recording is always the most popular way for people to share stuff.

The only ones who don't want us to share are those who want to make millions by never innovating.

Guess it's time to go underground, sigh.

Best alternative is a seedbox. Preferably in the Netherlands.

Several countries require proof of ID to purchase a SIM card.

But it's not piracy if you use it for an LLM, right‽

Don't give them ideas. Next they'll cut the blood stream to your brain.