Pirating a movie will probably not save someone's life, however access to knowledge by the right scientist can do that.

Do not conflate that with the more general piracy issue. The way these journals work is basically coercion: scientists are kept in a loop where they have to publish in the traditional journals because that's what gets the funding, and the funding sources use the same system because they (haven't bothered to create another|are afraid to|are lazy). To top it all, university libraries are forced to pay exorbitant annual fees to access the articles that their own staff wrote, corrected and reviewed for free (they even do the pictures for them). And all this is running on taxpayer money, yet the journals don't report to anyone. It's a mad system if you think about it.