> So, the other possibility is that authors deliberately reject the legal system per se.

I hope he's sarcastic because it's blindingly obvious to anyone who knows there's a copyright and published any stuff for other people to use. Reality is that if you publish something everybody can take it and use it. Copyright flies in the face of actual reality. So most people just ignore it. Consumers but also producers. Only lawyers still care. Nothing weird about it.

If you had a law that water is dry until explicitly declared wet by appropriate rightholder people would ignore that law in their daily lives if there were no enforcer around.