On the flip side, its important to know just how much we would be sacrificing if big frontier gets their way in convincing the courts that distillation is a bad thing
Like this scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBri-xgYvHQ Bill was saying that Steve was stealing from Xerox so it's okay if Bill stole from Xerox first.
I don't think anybody's denying that small models are doing distillation, the issue at hand is frontier lab vs frontier lab when it comes to big models.
The only thing they're going to try to do is ban Chinese models, and that's not going to fly outside the US, so Americans are going be the only losers.
You'd be shocked at some of the punishments handed out from various empires over history for offences as minor as stealing an apple. Whether they can claim the moral high ground is not question of ethics but a question of power.