alt Hacker NewsTorrents did not cost 10k+, and I think that distinction matters.
The bulk of AI users can pay $20/month for it, but not 10k+ up front. I agree frontier models will someday be dethroned, but today is not that day, and what the frontier companies do between now and then, legally still matters a great deal.
Piracy was similar, but it's trajectory was far more preditermined and unavoidable.
The model is the part that’s hard to replicate, and it can be torrented.
No one has managed to prevent pirates paying $10/month for seed boxes, and likewise they’re unlikely to succeed at preventing people renting minutes on an H200 located in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care about open models.
A bunch of tiny fly-by-night companies will bundle them with some management software into a subscription, and they’ll be too tiny and numerous to be worth dealing with when it takes an hour to set them back up.
Piracy in the torrenting sense hasn’t really ever come back, although it is as popular as ever if you count bootleg YouTube re-uploads, ripping music from YouTube, and the other non-traditional forms.