My postdoc advisor would receive the copyright transfer form from the publisher, modify the text to say he retained copyright, sign that, and send it back. Without fail, the publishers accepted that document, and published the paper. Again, I don't think this is legally tested, and my advisor said it's likely they didn't even notice the rewording of the copyright transfer document.
I thought the web would change this, but in my experience, people don't weight papers published in arxiv.org nearly as high as work published in peer-reviewed journals. And the vairous attempts at post-review (faculty of science, etc) haven't been able to replace the peer-reviewed journals successfully.
How is that different? Are you saying that we both should be allowed to redistribute/resell things we wrote at the behest (and wallet) of someone else?
Academics tend to do have a fairly odd and what seems like a romantic attitude to their work. They're employees, their programs and equipment are paid for by someone else whether that's the state or a business, they don't own it unless the terms they signed up to say so.
Most journals and conferences would only own the published paper but I have never ever heard of them going after authors sharing preprints privately.
Similar for IEEE/ISO/ANSI standards most people use the last published draft as a working substitute for the licensed standard if they don’t have the expensive licensed access to it.
Not saying that it isn’t broken but the idea that you couldn’t share it at all isn’t typical in science.
Book publishing is different though. Authors get paid. No publisher has a monopoly and there isn't really a reputation system that depends on the publisher.
You could argue that copyright terms are way too long (and I would agree), but I don't think you can justify book piracy nearly as easily as you can justify Sci-hub.