Even when the patent expires, it still doesn’t make sense for individual creatures to be downloaded for Thrive. Maybe for the museum page it would make sense, but putting a random species into a planet it didn’t evolve on should either kill it or disrupt the ecosystem (if that doesn’t happen then we haven’t managed to make auto-evo correctly). The only exception I see is that space stage planets could be downloaded so that the player doesn’t run out of potential planets to explore:
I remember there being a newer discussion as well but that thread showed up first in search.