What if Academic and Scholarly Publishers Paid Research Authors?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education sought to explore what the authors of the 10 most-downloaded Sci-Hub articles think of Sci-Hub. Aside from cherry-picking its facts (the journalist interviewed three authors out of dozens involved in the papers), the question itself is a red herring. After all, because publishers assume financial risk for scholarly and academic authors, the economic answer is obvious a priori — authors should have little problem with piracy of their material if said piracy might increase the number of people reading their work. After all, they suffer no harm from this.