The difference is, the journal publisher groups realised they can continue charging extortionary prices and get rid of the competition of "free" paper websites by suing everything that moved.
Academics, generally getting slightly-less-than-free copies of the papers at their institutions and generally being apathetic about their universities being extorted, created a gulf and precluded any kind of pirate culture.
But publishers have since become emboldened, prices have risen, the inequality access has been increasingly advocated for and brought to light, and the open access journals had a bit of momentum for moment.
Honestly, if you ask me, the solution here is pretty simple (at least in some fields). Negotiate (if it's not already granted) the permission to publish manuscripts and pre-prints. Submit them to ArXiV or Bio/MedRxiv, or whatever repository.
This doesn't tackle the issue of academics paying publishers to send emails to other academics who in turn work for free to review papers, but one battle at a time.