The downloading issue, much of that tied to copyright, did fizzle for a couple reasons.

To start, the sheer magnitude of that activity was overwhelming. This is not going to be the case with the developers, not the same numbers.

A second issue is the fact that we were dealing with "crimes" that were mostly civil, i.e people being sued or facing fines. When something is tied to a jail sentence, if can be.

They could easily tie this to espionage or something like that.

As for the open nature and decentralized, I agree with you 1000%. That is why we have to get as much data on permissionless networks as possible.