Do you need a VPN for some jurisdictions? NO. Should you use one anyways for obscurity and privacy? YES. Also to prevent issues with laws in other countries, which is unlikely from the start, but is exactly the point. Most countries only will try and prosecute copyright in their own jurisdictions unless you're uploading and providing content. When a copyright troll firm resolves your IP (usually through torrent swarms) and hostname and it points to a VPN data center or server, they're not going ANY further and they're just going to move on to the next victim.
If you're using one for security, Mullvad or iVPN are the two that come to mind mostly.
If you're looking for one to torrent with there are quiet a few, but anything with port forwarding should do. Mullvad can be slower because of their extremely high level of security in general. Something like IPVanish, or NordVPN.
Also below, this is an incredibly great reference that's continuously updated.
Not anymore. As of May 29th, "[n]ew port forwards will no longer be supported, and existing ports will be removed 2023-07-01"--meaning by now, no port forwarding is supported.