API rate limits? Suppose you could get around that with multiple IPs/accounts. How many queries do you need to steal a (reasonable size) model?
Alternatively, you could restrict your "stolen" model to a smaller domain and use fewer, more targeted examples for training. But at this point, you might as well start blending in predictions from other APIs, perhaps even training one off the errors of another. This is basically a technique that has been around for a long time, and in one incarnation is called "boosting" (see Adaboost).
With carefully selected queries based on an already trained model, I think you many not need so terribly many. But that's just an intuition.