They were chosen based on an entry that was less than 200 words. The winner is given an opportunity to write something more lengthy for when they are featured here.

Unfortunately, they make sense on the legal end. If we didn't have that restriction, it's very likely we wouldn't be able to hold the contest at all. When we're handing out something that has monetary value, we need to respect the laws and rules of every region we hold our contests in. For example, for something like this we can't say, "Europeans are eligible." Europe includes a lot of places. We would need to tailor the official legalese to conform to the laws of those countries, and quite honestly, we don't have the resources for that. In some of those cases, we would need to translate the rules into multiple languages for those people to be eligible. We definitely don't have people that can write the official rules in a dozen different languages.

So the whole thing might seem arbitrary, but it really isn't. It's what allows us to keep doing stuff like this. Yeah, it sucks, but the alternative isn't, "Include everyone." The alternative is, sadly, not to do contests at all.