Knowledge in your hands for free: a business proposal.

Sorry to say, but if that's your business proposal, then you're getting your MBA courses wrong 😫 not due to your proposal being clearly illegal, but because it has no monetization (and actually it's not business proposal per se, but charity proposal).

And regarding your question, while copyright infrigement is illegal worldwide, there's already a working solution which is used by major pirate resourses. And this solution is hosting copyrighed material on servers which are located on jurisdictions which are hostile towards countries where content owners and you personally live. This means if you need to host popular US/EU content, here's ISPs from China, Russia, Iran, Belarus and so on for your help. For sure, none of them would anyhow care of your privacy, freedom of speech and so on, but what's more important, none of them would also care about any EU/US issued copyright infrigement complaint about your server if it's not backed by local authorities. Needless to say, both your server and ISP HQ should both be placed in such country (server in Moscow won't save you from anything if you rent it from firm with main office in London).

Why does piracy need a business model? Sci-hub etc already exists.

1. Copyright is a HUGE pain in the arse, especially with books. Do you realise how hard some libraries have had to fight, just for trying to do, your business idea. On that note.
2. What’s your USP, especially compared to a library? They already have tons of physical and digital books, and other media. You can even request scientific papers, from some of them. Remember digital libraries are also a thing.
3. A lot of scientific papers are already available for free, online. They can be hard to find, but they are available.
4. How are you making money? What are the expected net/gross income? How are you going to convince them to pay?

Do you have lots of cash to support the copyright and maintenance fees? The Web archive (I think, or another similar website) got sued for having knowledge and book contents on their website. You can't just publish hacked books.

Most likely you would need a way to generate money for a "business".

There would be some ways like advertising (can be OK, but not always the best, it depends on how many adds, how scummy ads, and how much tracking/data selling).

Donations? = pretty much no expected revenue. The amount of revenue you can get is very low.

Paid features, but what features could be paid while keeping free access?

There's no easy way to make this into an actual business proposal... probably to the point that it isn't possible at all.

The tactic I could think of, if I were to NEED to do this... would be to try to find some way to argue on the grounds of some of the Ethical Altrusim stuff (I'm not a proponent of this stuff but... devil's advocate time).

You'd get a bunch of rich EA's to invest a shit ton of money on the regular, you take this money to pay the licensing fees or fees for use on other copyrighted research and technical manuals and then charge as close to zero as you can get away with for the individual users accessing the licensed/copyrighted work. The argument being, "more people having access to quality research and technical documentation will be a net positive for humanity and the return on investment will be measured in thousands of years in the future."

Yeah, I agree with other comments. You’ve just reinvented the library, but made it illegal. Libraries are not businesses (honestly thank god) and have no monetization model. A for profit library would be awful. Best come up with a different idea. Could stick with the theme and do like a data aggregation/search/sharing software, but even those I prefer to be foss which makes them not really “business model” friendly.

TL;DR you’ve discovered the library, now go donate to your local one

You might as well be selling drugs.. the only somewhat viable way you could do that is locally and offline in a country that just doesn't care (so russia or NK.)

As for proposing it, get a different idea. Your uni teacher will 100% reject this one.

Literally the best you could do is pound a few Red Bulls take your most expensive text books to your nearest library during the later hours and use their book scanner to make some PDFs.

What? I don't even get your pitch or call for contributions.

You have an idea but don't share it? Or is free access your idea?

Copyright is designed to funnel money into the hands of big business. If you want to spread free knowledge, you have to HIDE.

I graduated in Business management in 2021, it's really hard to propose your idea as a business model because your proposal is already a commodity in academic spaces.

Now again this is just a school project, I guess the way I would frame the pitch is to find a way to have access to this information (JSTOR for example) and available to the public at no cost but would require some sort of ad revenue service to maintain itself.

In our mostly capitalistic society where the goal is only money that intern leads to prosperity (in theory).. There is no possible monetary value to piracy that could counter the endless legal disputes. Maybe the business proposal should be "end ownership"

If you're acting as a middleman for end users receiving free product, and copyright holders demanding payment for their product, you have to run ads. This is not piracy.