To play devil's advocate, how is this kind of "civil disobedience" going to change the system? Why not pursue ways to legally change the system, e.g. new regulation on academic publishing?
I think Sci-Hub is amazing. I use it myself, I've written a brief "I am a Book Thief" essay (I need to brush that up) and had some discussions. I exchanged a few emails with a reporter from Nature on my own use of Sci-Hub, though I suspect I won't appear in his piece -- I'm apparently "quite unique" as a user. Unaffiliated, doing independent research on my own.
But I've got access to material I couldn't possibly otherwise obtain without phenomenally more time and cost. The ability to see a footnote and call up in a few seconds the article in question and read it to confirm understanding is simply amazing.
And the amount of published information that's still not available freely online, from the 1920s onward, is, frankly, criminal.
Sci-Hub doesn't change everything. Most especially, it doesn't change the current "publish-or-perish" regime in academia, nor the stranglehold "high-prestige" journals have over career advancement.
For-profit journals don't just play gatekeeper over readers of papers, but over the authors. If you cannot get your work into a prestige journal, your career languishes. And those journals are almost all proprietary, commercial, closed-access. This is a key roadblock to replacing them with open-access.
But Sci-Hub does but a sizeable crack in the dike. We can hope.
Basically, civil disobedience on a grand scale that changes the entire market for academic publishing is the only real way to effectively change the system for the better.
Ironic really. If companies like Elsevier had charged reasonable prices for academic papers from the very start, then this would never have been as big an impact - certainly it wouldn't have been an existential threat to them.
I for one won't be crying any tears when such companies are rubbed out of existence.
Another thing to consider is what market forces are at play in academic publishing. For authors, the currency is prestige and career advancement, and it's not clear how scihub could change that part of the market.