This is quite different to music and film for a variety of reasons:
1. Film and music were always vaguely reasonably priced, and collecting a fee is totally reasonable - at least some of the money goes to the creators. This is not true for papers. The authors are never paid and the prices are insane.
2. Music & videos are luxuries, and are also somewhat fungible. If you need a specific paper (e.g. because it was referenced by another) you usually can't just swap it for another.
3. The actual files are usually a lot smaller than music and definitely smaller than films, so it will be easier to share entire libraries and hence harder to stop.
4. Morality is clearly on the side of sci-hub. Music/film piracy is much more ambiguous.
1. is painfully true. Movies and music cost money to make, and that money is recouped by sales. We can talk about profiteering and Hollywood accounting and the like, but fundamentally sales still fuel production.
Academic work also costs money, but journals have tricked someone else into paying for it. Research gets done on government, corporate, and university budgets, submitters get no compensation, and reviewers do the hard work behind publication for free. Journals have been priced far above costs for decades, but with the advent of online distribution costs have sunk even further while prices continue to rise.
The best (moral) argument against piracy was always "if everyone does this, we won't get more media". That's not even true in the case of journals: it looks an awful lot like the system would find a way to work even at 100% piracy rates.
Regarding point 4: piracy has provided the ability to masses to a wealth of obscure, hard to find cultural gems. I for example am into animation. There is no way I would have been able to access, legal or otherwise, half of the films I have seen, many of which are cultural milestones in the history of animation.
Also, in wealth terms, if you start with the reasonable assumption that a pirated copy doesn't directly translate to a sales loss, then piracy can be argued to be a net plus, since vastly more people "profit" from it (the people who download) than there are people who suffer from it (the people being pirated).
Just wanted to mention those arguments, since I rarely hear them in these discussions.
Even that is debatable, because it also creates exposure. This is especially true for non-mainstream stuff. So you might end up with a net sales-win because of the "advertising"
There's never been any impediment to people giving away their music for free to create exposure. To radio stations, TV, movies, as free concerts, as mp3s to download from their website, whatever.
The argument "I'm pirating the fruit of your work and investment against your will, but trust me it'll be in your best interest, I know your interest better than you do" is untenable.
1. Film and music were always vaguely reasonably priced, and collecting a fee is totally reasonable - at least some of the money goes to the creators. This is not true for papers. The authors are never paid and the prices are insane.
2. Music & videos are luxuries, and are also somewhat fungible. If you need a specific paper (e.g. because it was referenced by another) you usually can't just swap it for another.
3. The actual files are usually a lot smaller than music and definitely smaller than films, so it will be easier to share entire libraries and hence harder to stop.
4. Morality is clearly on the side of sci-hub. Music/film piracy is much more ambiguous.