While in theory I agree with you, in practice anyone who cares about academic papers or books either gets them from their university or knows how to get them for free. I don't think I've heard anyone ever complain about wanting to read an academic paper but being unable to do for free.
Well, let this be the first case you've heard of this. I just graduated, but while I was a student at the University of Sydney, I found that many journals (including ACM and IEEE, and even ISO) were not accessible through our university's library system. I usually just decided to not bother citing those papers and citing others.
It just so happens that the field I was working in (astrophysics) is one where many papers are published on arXiv, but my supervisor always got frustrated when I used the arXiv copy of a paper (sometimes the final edit of a paper isn't uploaded to arXiv so you might be citing something which was removed after the journal review). And for papers not on arXiv, you can sometimes manage to the paper on the author's website but that's hardly a workable system (and those are usually preprints and not the final draft). And yes, you can get papers by emailing the author if you really need a copy but that limits your ability to search through many papers as broad background reading (it seems a waste of time for M researchers to ask N authors for a copy of a paper, only to read the abstract and results).
Academic papers (which are publicly funded through grants and often produced by public institutions) should be free to the public. Those papers have already been paid for by the public.
EDIT: ISO not being available was legitimately a real blow -- I was working on a personal project that required reading the DataMatrix standard and I couldn't get access to it. Instead I had to try to piece together the protocol from the Wikipedia description and just gave up because I couldn't get it working.
ISO tends to be aggressive about their intellectual property, and given the prices of the standards, few people bother re-writing them to avoid their copyright. They have a lot of somewhat obscure standards that are highly priced, such as ISO/IEC 29192-x lightweight cryptography standards (each being ~60 bucks a pop).
Less well-known papers are difficult to pirate, but even if that wasn't true I also think that it's quite strange to argue that researchers should pirate papers rather than making the papers free to the public.
I work in industry in a position where having access to papers is very helpful, some would say essential.
I have access to IEEE and ACM DLs. I don’t, however, have access to myriad papers from other organizations like Elsevier or Springer Verlag. These are often cited by papers on IEEE/ACM DLs. Some are from 20-40 years ago and still very relevant and interesting.
I have yet to find a way to get access to these in a predictable manner (yes, sometimes you can find preprints or old PostScript versions on various authors academic websites, but not generally).
Often the contents are from government sponsored research from the US government and possibly other governments (if only through their support of Universities in their country).
I did my bachelor's degree in a private college in India. It was not the best even in the city it was in, and didn't have enough money for these things. Did I not deserve to study things because I didn't have the money?
Edit: Just to add insult to injury I published 2 papers while in my bachelor's and I could not access them because they were behind a paywall by Elsevier.
Again, it's very easy to find these papers. There are subreddits where people will post any paper you ask for, also there are IRC channels that will do the same. But for most stuff, you can very easily find it yourself in <1m. I agree that the papers should be free, but in practice, the fact that the papers are not free isn't that big of a deal since they are so easy to get anyways for free.
Yes, lets promote illegal behavior. There is a short story by Cory Doctorow called "The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away" and it makes a great point about the kind of thing you are suggesting. Here is a link to it
This is narrow sighted. In practice the Universities pay the very high fees. The major University in Paris where I did my Ph.D. and work has cut more and more of those accesses through the years and they seemed extremely expensive.
Before 1990 the activity of a scientific journal was somehow more complicated and costly which somehow justified the subscription cost. With the current Internet infrastructure and tools, paywalls feel more and more like symbols of legacy monopolistic economy rent.
You should at least glance at the table of contents of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_science and read those short sections "Publicly funded science will be publicly available" and "Disadvantages".
