Any how-to-advice on jailbreaking?

I think there have been past threads on this. The short story is Google Scholar, Google, your local university library, LW's research help page, /r/Scholar, and the Wikipedia Resource Request page.

I wonder if "pirating" papers has any real chance of adverse repercussions.

I have 678 PDFs on gwern.net alone, almost all pirated, and perhaps another 200 scattered among my various Dropboxes. These have been building up since 2009. Assuming linear growth, that's something like 1,317 paper-years (((678+200)/2)*3) without any warning or legal trouble so far. By Laplace, that suggests a risk of trouble per paper-year of 0.076% (((1+0)/(1317+2)) * 100). So, pretty small.