A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic.<p>If we&#x27;re talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive.  In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them.  And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn&#x27;t.  So, simply putting together a manuscript would cost on the order of $5,000-10,000.  In actual practice, this is something like a month of searching and reading papers.  To sustain that rate is obviously impractical.<p>This makes those without institutional access completely deprived of useful access to the world&#x27;s research.  It&#x27;s a terrible, indefensible situation.