Sure, but the kind of 'paper sharing' services such as proposed by the OP have the same problem. Many journals do allow you to share your own article, although I don't know the details by hard nor would I even know where to start looking for the conditions of publishing of my own papers.
Your last two paragraphs illustrate my point, or rather the myopic viewpoint that these 'paper liberators' advocate - nobody outside of the HN crowd I know (and yes, this is limited to a few fields) even cares about this supposed 'stranglehold'. Well everybody grumbles every now and then, but at least nobody cares enough to really push for change, and the things people grumble about (slow editors, idiotic formatting requirements, ...) are mostly not solved by 'open access' journals. Everybody has access to their universities' libraries, or contacts the authors themselves, or has some research assistant dig them up for them. Yes yes the subscriptions cost the universities real money, but come on, much more money is wasted by universities on other trivial stuff. Look, I'm not saying the model is perfect, it's just that (IMO) it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.
I admit I'm not saying that ThePaperBay necessarily offers the right solution but I am refuting your claim that there isn't really a problem. The issue here is that there has always been a problem. Academic output should always have been available to anyone who wanted it _at a fair price_. Until electronic documents became so ubiquitous you could tollerate the constraints of publisher ownership because they helped overcome real problems of communication and physical distribution. The question is haven't we now reached the point where these problems have gone away?
...it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.
This division between researchers and everyone else is exactly the kind of elitism that broader access to research is supposed to reduce. People fighting for open access aren't necessarily responding to an existing widespread demand, but anticipating the future benefits to society.
They are trying to be ahead of the curve, somewhat like the oft maligned RMS was ahead of the curve with his understanding of and fighting against DRM.
Your last two paragraphs illustrate my point, or rather the myopic viewpoint that these 'paper liberators' advocate - nobody outside of the HN crowd I know (and yes, this is limited to a few fields) even cares about this supposed 'stranglehold'. Well everybody grumbles every now and then, but at least nobody cares enough to really push for change, and the things people grumble about (slow editors, idiotic formatting requirements, ...) are mostly not solved by 'open access' journals. Everybody has access to their universities' libraries, or contacts the authors themselves, or has some research assistant dig them up for them. Yes yes the subscriptions cost the universities real money, but come on, much more money is wasted by universities on other trivial stuff. Look, I'm not saying the model is perfect, it's just that (IMO) it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.