How to steal 50 million paywalled papers | Family Inequality

" ... Now that sci-hub is in place, how hard is it for an untrained individual to steal a $40 article while risking almost nothing? As hard as it is to insert 11 characters into a paywall URL and wait a few seconds (plus your share of the one hour I expended on this post). Here’s an example. In the journal Society, published by Springer, an article in the current issue is currently available for $39.95 to non-subscribers. But Society is a “hybrid open access” journal, which means authors or their institutions can pay to have their paper unlocked for the public (I don’t know how much it costs to unlock the article, but let’s just assume it’s a rollicking awesome deal for Springer). So for this example I use one of the unlocked articles, so you can try this without stealing anything, if that feels more ethical to you, but it works exactly the same way for the locked ones ..."