Legal differentiations in some places between downloading and distributing.
On other hand with torrents you usually automatically upload. And even single uploaded copy can result is some extremely questionable math of potential damages. Which the legal system in essence has blessed.
Just like I can send you a copyrighted image via email and the email server owner isn't liable for the material on their drive.
Also it's hard to track compared to the ease of monitoring public torrent swarms.
With torrents you can just enter the swarm, log all IP addresses and maybe download a bit that it's actually infringing material.
With news the stuff is ascii jumble spread in posts with weird names and you need to download it all to figure out if it's what it says. And just looking for material from the 300TB backlog is a huge pain.