They were? how

Definitely a joke, but also maybe not a joke. Enough pressure was put on pirates through ISPs threatening to drop customers (or was it to sue them?) that streaming services saw greater adoption. People are risk averse when it comes to lawsuits from publishers I suppose.

So you can still pirate, but most people don't. Maybe LLMs will be the same, sure you could use an uncensored/unlicensed model that doesn't pay royalties to publishers, but why risk it?

It's not quite the same... maybe even reversed. Big companies can "secretly" use private datasets with copyrighted or legally questionable data with a wink and a nod, without anyone being able to prove it in court.

Open source models generally do not have that option. Maybe there are some exceptions like Meta using some private data in future Llamas, but I question how sustainable those efforts are.

Streaming services got higher adoption because the price/trouble cost was worth it. People saw value in putting $7/month into a service that delivers high quality video.

This might not last with the fragmentation of streaming services (I don't think people are ready to pay $10x10 for access to all services).

Part of the trouble side though is taking the proper precautions to not trigger a strike from your ISP or a letter from RIAA. And a lot of people didn’t/don’t understand what those precautions are. Don’t know the size of the effect but there was probably some.

As peer comments mentioned, that's completely missing the order of causation. Steam is a better example, because there was never any weird organization threatening everybody they could send a letter to with lawsuits. Yet it grew exponentially.

I think, in general, there are relatively few completely ideological 'pirates.' People will buy things when they can easily afford it, and it's easy to do so. When it's too expensive, not locally available, or when the payment methods involve hassles, they will simply download it instead.

Most piracy is P2P and requires some "computer literacy" to use.

Most streaming, AFAIK, is not P2P. Streaming gives you instant access to the content, and streaming clients are often simpler to use, with features such as recommender systems, etc.