Journals in the library + interlibrary loan keep them on the right side of copyright law. And many more expensive subscriptions provide universities with access to parts of the JSTOR archive. What's more, there are no university copyright investigations to fear: no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read (how could that even work?), but even if they did, grad students have a perfectly legal explanation: they can just say they read/acquired their documents from the library and no one can prove otherwise.

Universities aren't stupid; they know there's no threat from dropping JSTOR and they can count to $50,000 all too well.

Unless the university library it itself providing a unified accessible system to access a torrented (and somehow constantly up to date?) archive of JSTOR, then JSTOR will not be dropped. You are having serious tunnel vision if you think all grad students and professors want to spend their time fucking around with that, or even know how to do that.

I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music.

And every university already has a unified accessible non-JSTOR system for reading old journal articles: its called the journal stacks in the library basement + interlibrary loan. Everyone already knows how to deal with that: its just less convenient.

A university officially providing a pirated archive of JSTOR would be opening itself up to legal liability itself worth more than 50k. Add to that the cost of maintaining a digital archive comparable to JSTOR, the cost of training, and the cost of keeping it up to date, and you have to be absolutely insane or intellectually dishonest if you claim even a struggling school with limited resources would go with that.

> I know that every university, there are multiple servers where students share terabytes of pirated movies, TV shows and music.

You are being delusional if you think such a system is at all comparable to what it would take to replace JSTOR for all but a fraction of university JSTOR users.

I was a technically inclined CS guy with far to much free time while in university and I would be royally pissed if my university had dropped JSTOR for some sort of ghetto fileshare with an aging torrent. Anyone a less ideal user than I would be crippled by that.

As I wrote earlier, I don't think universities would ever provide a pirated archive. They wouldn't need to. Grad students talk. They pass around USB drives. And pretty soon, everyone has the archive on their laptop.

Such a system would never replace a subscription to JSTOR. You have massive tunnel vision if you honestly think it could.

It could cause them financial harm. Libraries have a fixed budget and choose wisely which subscriptions to take. If people at a department already know where to get the stuff that JSTOR offers for free, that will make the JSTOR subscription less valuable and other subscriptions more valuable to them.

Academics are quite used to being creative in acquiring articles. It's not untypical to ask colleagues and friends at other universities to scan and email articles that they can't get access to through their own library. Before the advent of the Internet this was done with letters. Downloading a torrent is a minor inconvenience in comparison.

A large majority of people I have talked to have at some point acquired scans of at least on book online (be it to give it to students because the library has only one copy, for convenience during travelling or because the local library has no copies and an interlibrary loan would take some time while they need the book now).

umm. That may have been true in the latter half of the '90s and the first half of the 'noughties but it is certainly not true today. Most universities have an extensive copyright policing function in their network operations center, designed to shield them from liability.

Not to say that pirate servers aren't hanging out on Uni nets these days, but they are stealthed, and deniable.

"no one is going to force grad students to prove that they legally obtained every paper they ever read"

Nor would anyone hesitate to prosecute one of us (yes, I am a grad student) if we were to share an archive on BitTorrent.

"Universities aren't stupid"

Really? Part of my introduction to grad school was an annoying quiz about complying with copyrights and a bunch of reminders about the penalties I would face if I dared to infringe. Yes, really, my school takes copyrights that seriously, and guess what? My alma mater also subjected me to that sort of treatment during my undergrad orientation.

Do you really think universities are prepared to stand up to the copyright system? Do you think any mainstream university is going to suggest that people download an illegal archive of scholarly publications? I can tell you this: I would be shocked if any respected university official endorsed the use of an illegal archive of scholarly articles, textbooks, or anything containing even the tiniest amount of human knowledge.