alt Hacker NewsHow is an author fairly compensated when you torrent their book? Should we just stop paying for media because it's infinitely reproducible?
Nothing physical is being stolen when a company makes a clone of a product based on another company's designs, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have patent laws.
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Purely anecdotal I know of a fair few creatives who ultimately are just happy people enjoy their works and don't really care how they're getting it. I understand that's a privileged attitude in the current world as they are all living relatively comfortable lives but at least philosophically I agree with it. We as humans have done a lot to reduce scarcity for a great deal many things but we still cling to it as an idea because of stubbornness and greed.
Maybe I'll get labeled a 'commie' for saying all this but I think we create a world where everyones needs are met and things(information & media are the easiest imo) are freely available. Thinking we can't do this is a bit of a disservice to the capabilities of humans.
The author is not fairly compensated in that case, but if you buy the book, he is. If you bought books and learned to code from them and then went on to go found a startup that ended up being worth billions, you don't owe that author one dollar more than you already paid him when you bought his book. That's more like the AI case here.