>“Most papers are now freely available somewhere on the Internet, or else you might choose to work with preprint versions. Clearly our negotiating position is strong. It is not clear that we want or need a paid extension of the old contracts.”
Awesome! It's going to be fun when Elsevier eventually tries to go after SciHub in Germany for copyright violations. I can imagine state prosecutors asking: "So you want us to prosecute someone for not paying you for access to public research?". One can hope...