For example, there's this widely told story about how Airbnb in the beginning exploited Craig's List to list their properties. This is not illegal, it's not that they hacked into Craig's List, but it's for sure not ok. It's ok to break the rules as long you are not caught. Imagine if everybody would start doing that. Therefore, I'm also not surprised that they don't give two shits about city regulations and so on.
Right, that's what "hack" doesn't imply to me. I mean, this is "Hacker News", but it is not about nefarious activities. That said, I do understand that's what it implies to the younger generations.
> It's ok to break the rules as long you are not caught.
This is an attitude that seems to be common in SV, and I'm disappointed if YC doesn't reject applicants who demonstrate it.
In socialism, as far as I can tell, anyone would totally be able to ingest all these books, as there would be no concept of intellectual property rights. Thus, what you complain about with respect to capitalism, would be a totally normal and acceptable thing to do in socialism.
Do you have some other, alternative system in mind, which would not allow a wholesale exploitation of private intellectual property?
For example, in the early days Amazon famously "leveraged" the purchase of out of print books from their wholesalers to obtain orders that would otherwise be too small to ship.
That's just how capitalism works. You have to be either too small to bother with or too big to fail -- the problem area is in the middle.