> If I buy and read a book on software engineering
You're comparing that you as an individual purchase one copy of a book to a multi-billion dollar company systematically ingesting them for profit without any compensation, let alone proportional?
> do I owe the author a percentage of my lifetime earnings?
No, but you are a human being. You have a completely different set of rights from a corporation, or a machine. For very good reason.
If you pirate a book on software engineering and then use that knowledge to start a career, do you owe the author the royalties they would be paid had you bought the book?
If the career you start isn't software engineering directly but instead re-teaching the information you learned from that book to millions of paying students, is the regular royalty payment for the book still fair?
This makes no sense. If I buy and read a book on software engineering, and then use that knowledge to start a career, do I owe the author a percentage of my lifetime earnings?
Of course not. And yet I've made money with the help of someone else's intellectual work.
Copyright is actually pretty narrowly defined for _very good reason_.