Yeah, so what you describe is basically what's happening now. Piracy is convenient enough for individuals to get around paywalls, but not so convenient or wides

Yeah, so what you describe is basically what's happening now. Piracy is convenient enough for individuals to get around paywalls, but not so convenient or widespread (in terms of use) that universities start cancelling subscriptions. If piracy stays that way and doesn't kill subscriptions then it's sort of a win win, readers effectively get access and the work of publishers is compensated. Right now that's true, and piracy is a net positive (in my view anyway). But the obvious concern there is that that homeostasis won't last. There are other business models that are being tried that mimic the current one a bit. For example, instead of a university library paying a subscription fee to gain access to content, they can pay a fee to allow all researchers at their university to be allowed to publish in all of a publisher's journals. Essentially moving the APC charges from individual researchers to universities. I know we've tried floating that idea and have gotten a lot of resistance from libraries, which I don't fully understand because it seems entirely reasonable to me. One other note: Gold OA APC charges are not being paid out of the author's pocket. Nearly all the APC charges are coming from grant money that funds the research (or from central government funding, like China). All the major funders allow a PI to account for publication charges. So publication is treated just like any other research expense, like buying equipment. It all comes from the funders. That works great, and honestly seems like a perfectly reasonable setup, but it only works for funded research. That leaves entire swaths of the academic landscape out (as I've said elsewhere that means most of the humanities and social sciences).