> let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create

I co-published two scientific papers back when I was a PhD student. Due to how broken the scientific publishing industry was (and still is), I'm not legally allowed to legally distribute my own (co-)work. I'm not even allowed to view it!

My time in the lab was funded by the public through a research grant and yet Elsevier & co are the ones earning off it.

It's not right, and never was.

Isn’t that what preprints are for? My limited experience was that authors have an essentially identical preprint version they submitted and happily share them with collaborators or typically on request. Conventionally people did that before sci-hub which is normative now for researchers who aren’t subject to extreme compliance requirements, but it’s still done.

Most journals and conferences would only own the published paper but I have never ever heard of them going after authors sharing preprints privately.

Similar for IEEE/ISO/ANSI standards most people use the last published draft as a working substitute for the licensed standard if they don’t have the expensive licensed access to it.

Not saying that it isn’t broken but the idea that you couldn’t share it at all isn’t typical in science.

Yeah definitely. Scientific publishing is 100% an immoral scam.

Book publishing is different though. Authors get paid. No publisher has a monopoly and there isn't really a reputation system that depends on the publisher.

You could argue that copyright terms are way too long (and I would agree), but I don't think you can justify book piracy nearly as easily as you can justify Sci-hub.