[aurelwu]

I don't doubt people will get pirated copies instead of using the paper versions, but the existence of the paper versions allows them to pretend they read the paper in a legit way. I'm not taking sides for that sort of behaviour or against it, just that I expect that will be the workflow.

[betterunix2]

Nobody has to pretend to have read articles in a legitimate way; a researcher only has to be able to give a legitimate citation for the article. Citations should be sufficient for other researchers to find the article in question and BibTeX data is easy to find for most published work. I frequently google the title, authors, and sometimes year (if there are multiple versions from different years) and download a PDF from wherever (rarely the official publisher, because logging in is too difficult), and then just find BibTeX data as needed when I am writing a paper.