[blagie]

It's a minor risk, but with astronomical potential liability. Statutory damages for wilful violation can be up to $150,000 per violation. If your employees download 100 articles, that's a cool $15M.

In many cases, these sorts of crackdowns can come long after-the-fact. The statute-of-limitations is short (3 years, I think), but a lot of courts start the clock ticking when the violation is discovered. If your organization pirates for 30 years, and a publisher does an investigation in 2022, and discovers all 30 years of violations, they would likely file in such a venue.

In most cases, the liability comes in when a business is failing, and goes into don't-give-an-f territory. If Elsevier / Google / Amazon / Coke / [insert random successful business] starts suing researchers when they're big, they're liabile to be hated for it, which endangers their brand and their existing business.

If Elsevier goes into bankruptcy and those copyrights get bought up by parasites, or otherwise starts struggling to survive (as inevitably happens with almost any business eventually) those sorts of retroactive lawsuits often come into play. Most businesses I worked with in the nineties went into owned-by-sleazeballs territory at some point in the forty years since.