There's nothing to 'pay back'. Rentier capitalism has us convinced copying is theft, but only because the propertied classes have created artificial scarcity and high exploitative rents. [1] After we move to Commons based peer production, we will have a new reality, and artificial scarcity will be seen for what it is: domination.
[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...
I'm convinced we've just taken the industrial age economic and banking system and copied it into the digital age, but we haven't accounted for the near-zero marginal cost of information creation, storage and transmission. So the actual scarcity vs. the artificial scarcity of things is off.
I think we can get there by valuing knowledge differently: subsidizing the cost of knowledge production and distribution - all costs from the start - so that it doesn't need a business model once produced. I think that's the key. To read more on this phenomenon I enjoy Yochai Benkler, who came up with the term 'Commons based peer production'. Some examples include Linux, Github, Open Source Ecology, Precious Plastic, Wikipedia, Sensorica, Valueflows (Holo-REA) and Holochain.
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"Money is just information, a way we measure what we trade, nothing of value in itself." [1] [2]
I am closely following the work of Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun of the MetaCurrency Project. They've been working on digital age wealth acknowledgement systems (protocol cooperativism) for over a decade: https://medium.com/holochain/beyond-blockchain-simple-scalab...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwmM5Nb6hiE
[2] http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/05/14/id-53, http://eric.harris-braun.com/blog/2007/11/05/id-55 (if down, you can get an archived copy on Archive.org)