Like torrents, you first have to resort to random websites who get randomly taken down as they acquire reputation. If a person takes the face and responsibility for something, he gets litigated into oblivion.
So you get to the point where trustworthy and untrustworthy sources are indistinguishable
. Now what they do is create untrustworthy sources. Like time for popcorn. Sow discord.
Fork several times, create intentionally malwared versions of both the program and the website. Keep kicking off the trustworthy sources of search engines, while magically skipping takedown requests for the less trustworthy websites.
Find ways to break old versions if possible, just to force them to keep moving. (they can make gradio randomly change APIs just to break the old trustworthy versions)
All of this can happen.
Before this gets flagged to oblivion, this is obvious. You just have to recognise that the "regulators" and industry insiders Emad is trying to "shield" you from are enemies and ask yourself, how do I hurt them?
And reasonably technical people have zero issues, as it should be.
Media piracy has been abundant my entire life. It's never slowed down or become inaccessable.
You didn't mention one of the largest (perhaps even the largest) distributor of copyright content (which happens to also be free, for now): YouTube.
You can watch/listen to endless amounts of copyrighted content (and other types of content) on there completely for free, and to say it's tremendously popular would be an understatement.
Google has made it work through ads. Perhaps something like that will happen with image-generating AI.
You mention Popcorn time. I wonder if torrents in general could be a great example of how something like this plays out? Torrenting took the world by storm and had an amazing "product-market fit" for the early internet days. Of course, downloading copyrighted material was always illegal but that didn't stop many.
Over time, legal but paid alternatives rose up: Spotify, iTunes, Netflix. These players found their place in the market by balancing the interest of copyright holders and the needs of users looking for cheap and easy access to entertainment.
Just as Netflix acquired large content libraries, same here. With enough money, large training datasets could be acquired in a legally solid manner.
It's interesting to think where this analogy might fail as well, and how the paths of these technologies could differ. For one, torrenting was mostly for entertainment, and thus impacted B2C first. On the other hand, language models are more so for media _creation_ and the B2B sphere.