I’ll be honest, most piracy is only legally bad and not morally bad. I’d also prefer AI companies pirate already scanned content than destroy potentially rare books and hoard the scans, which fails to benefit the wider intellectual community.

In a world where 95 years of copyright is the minimum, and works like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone likely won’t enter the public domain until approximately 2120AD, I fail to see a moral argument be made for any book published pre-2011.

As it stands, we are caught between allowing AI companies unfettered access to copyrighted material or allowing the corpus of human creativity to be squandered by rights holders. It is an unfortunate position to be in, but I would far prefer a copyright minimalist world than what we currently suffer through, even if that means AI companies are vacuuming up the intellectual works of humanity.

Yes, unless your car was stolen, you decided to let someone you trust to drive your car so you gotta pay the fine. I also pay for the toilet paper my house guests use. Hopefully they don't use too much.