That's the paper's conclusion. They see the beginning of the piracy-friendly period as the release of BitTorrent in 2001, and the beginning of the end in 2013 when Microsoft Office 365 came out.

Now everything is tied to central control, who can turn off your service any time they want to.

People will eventually get fed up with it and make free software that runs locally. It will take time but I have no doubt it will happen. I find this is a much more reasonable proposition than waiting the 100+ years it takes for copyright to be invalidated.

Even if I have to say that the subscription model is pretty good for B2B: fixed expense per month, someone to bother if things don't work, instead of spending my own employees time keeping infra up and debugging bugs.

I don't like SaaS for my personal use, I prefer to pay once, keep forever and fix on my own (for similar reasons to why I like cooking my own food instead of ordering take out all the time).

Maybe even hardware, like a Pi server that serves up the app even...