My funding councils want people to publish in open-access journals, but they don't provide extra funds for the doubling of cost that's involved. The money has to come from somewhere, and the main cost item tends to be student stipends, so professors tend to continue publishing in pay-access journals.
I've been on both sides of the "fetch for a friend" process. I've had to ask friends to fetch copies of papers that I've written, for which I've paid page charges, because my university had to drop the journal in one or another waves of cost saving.
And for all this money, the journals do very little in the way of contributing to the process, nowadays. Reviewers work for free, as do most academic editors. Technical editors seem to barely exist anymore, since authors do their own typesetting and journals rely on academic reviewers to help with English.
Academics are caught in a narrowing vice as they move through the career process. Papers have to appear in high-reputation journals, or else. And those journals just happen to be expensive.
Note that asking for an article is not always illegal. For example, authors are often allowed to share the article, and there are often also provisions that allow institutions to "loan" access to each other (inter-library loan), although presumably that would have to go through the institution's librarian.
That said, even if it's illegal, I'd worry about it about as much as worrying about pedestrians skipping the red light on deserted crossings.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/scientific-resea...
I thought the music anti piracy people were bad.
Of course this can happen only when the end user uses the formal interlibrary loan process, instead of alternatives like Sci-Hub (which may be faster and easier).
As with the high subscription prices, the primary mark is not faculty/students but libraries, who are expected to provide the content and constrained from doing anything blatantly illegal to get it.