Until we have solid open access mandates, pirating seems to be the way.

Google scholar with automatic PDF lookup is of course another part of the way.

As a legal stopgap measure, someone could create journal-matic which scrapes the table of contents of each journal issue (or set of conference proceedings) and links it to PDFs from the authors' personal web sites.

I note that USENIX has had open access for years. It's disappointing that ACM and IEEE still view their digital libraries as cash cows to be milked to pay for unrelated expenses.

Why is pirating not the way if the system is making no effort to change it and any change the system would try to make would be solely to the benefit of companies like Elsevier?

Pirating is the way. Because nothing will ever change.