Sci-Hub is not a legal alternative, that is an issue. There are legal ways to get papers without subscription for a reasonable price (inter-library loans), but they take more time and effort.
Depends on where you live. In my country it is perfectly legal for scientific or teaching purposes. And any article with a Belgian author has to be freely available by law max 3-6 months after publication (depending on the field).
It can be argued that reading scientific articles is a basic human right, see art. 27 of the UN declaration: "Everyone has the right freely [..] to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."
> To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication.
Why this duty is so often neglected escapes me, since:
(1) it's to our great benefit (in a general greater good sense, yes, but here I'm saying it's to someone's great personal benefit) to make your research articles as easily accessible as possible (think: h-index).
(2) It's not like PubMed / PMC is some obscure portal scientists rarely visit. It's where the majority of us begin our lit search. If you are writing a grant / thesis / dissertation it's practically our homepage. Basically I'm saying it's collectively odd behavior that we use PubMed as our primary portal to access research articles, but not bother to ensure our own research articles are easily accessible through this portal.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/intro/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/
It is just one criterion among the many criteria that you use for your decision process.