This is a big reason why piracy exists even when something is available through official means.

Those offering a paid services should always ensure there is a benefit and convenience compared to piracy. Valve and Steam wouldn't be here if it was clumsy like in the beginning. Gamers like that getting a game is just a click away, that it installs and checks all the required dependencies, keeps the game file updated, allows you to preload and keep your game saves in the cloud (when possible).

Visitors to university libraries reportedly continue to be harassed by campus police officers for "overusing" the taxpayer-funded electronic resources which they are supposed to be making available to members of the general public in exchange for the generous property tax exemptions (under so-called PILOT agreements) that they receive from local and state government.

At MIT, a few years after the arrest of Aaron Swartz, a prominent researcher from Mass General Hospital was threatened one afternoon with arrest by an MIT police officer for the alleged "crime" of using one of the library computer terminals for "longer than an hour."

It's worth remembering then that there are some out there who are using SciHub now because they don't want to go to jail for trying to access the same content through more "legally legit" channels.

I also have full access to basically all journals and recently surveyed well over 500 papers in my field of research. Sci-hub was an indispensable tool for this, because it provides a consistent user interface to download _all_ papers. I was able to automate 90% of the PDF downloads because of it, some were blocked because of captcha's, but I was able to solve those manually.

This type of semi-automation would be very impractical and cost an order of magnitude more time if I had to dig through the probably non-existent API documentation individual publishers have, or try and scrape their I'm sure by now heavily obfuscated websites.

Same. When I heard about Scihub, this was the page I usually downloaded papers from. I used to have access to a lot of journals, but downloading a journal was annoying. Meanwhile, Scihub provided a field to put an URL in, and you got a PDF back - which was ridiculously simple.

That's a really bad sign for mainstream journals.

At the end of the day when considering the behavior of large numbers of heterogeneous users, UX is king for all data consumption. The pricepoint matters, but people would use SciHub even if traditional journals somehow moved to free publication... If the UX is better for SciHub.

I use sci-hub at home because remoting into my academic network requires me to use 2FA. It's not like the journal is charging my institution per download, so there's no monetary difference between me getting it either way. So I go the lazy route and I don't really feel bad about it.

I assume most of the users of scihub have legitimate access to some content. Even the most well funded universities don't subscribe to every journal. When doing a lit search, it is very common to wind up with many potentially interesting papers you don't have subscription access to. Getting access to these papers legitimately involves writing request forms for each individual paper (as access typically costs something like $40 per paper) and then sitting around for between a few hours and a few days before being granted access. Frequently the papers don't even contain the data you want (which you can't know in advance because you can only see the abstracts before paying), rendering the entire exercise a waste of time. It's far easier to simply jump on scihub, get the data you need immediately, and sidestep this process.

It's also not like there was no piracy before scihub showed up. When I encountered a paper I didn't have access to back in the day, I would ping all of my friends at various universities / companies / hospitals and request that they check if they had access. If so, I would ask that they download it and send it to me. They would do the same when appropriate. Even doing this was more efficient than going through official channels, and every time this was done it represents another lost sale. From a user perspective, the piracy has nothing to do with money and is instead entirely about friction.