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They have no competition on any given paper that they hold the rights to.

Well, maybe no competition when we're talking about institutional access rights on dry land. However, for everyone else, there's quite a bit of competition out there in the high seas.

That's only for individual usage, which, I assume, is small potatoes compared to institutional usage. No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy, and neither is it going to boycott Springer, since at least some researchers would put up a fuss—because you don't just need access to lots of papers, sometimes you need access to that specific paper.

> No major research institution is going to use piracy as an institutional policy

But they could adopt an official policy of all publications being CC licensed and uploaded to at least one of a few officially sanctioned preprint services. That would do a lot to undercut the publishers going forward.

At this point a lot becomes open access after a few years anyway. The issue is historic papers but all of those can be reliably found on the high seas.

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