napster for journal articles

["Terry Westley" <twestley@buffalo.veridian.com>]

Obligatory Ada reference:  I was looking for articles on
longest common subsequence algorithm because I wanted to
understand why Unix and Clearcase diff utilities are so
bad.  They work on lines when they could just as easily
work on language tokens or words or characters.

Then, I wondered...

What would it take to create something like Napster for
finding/sharing journal articles?

The most obvious obstacle is that the copyrights often
belong to IEEE, ACM, and other publishers who want to make
money on their digital libraries.

For you who have published or are familiar with the
publishing world:  Does the author ever or often retain
rights to share a copy of the article with others as a
document separate from the original published journal?

--
Terry J. Westley, Software Systems Engineering Supervisor
Veridian Engineering, Calspan Operations
twestley@buffalo.veridian.com   http://www.veridian.com/
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Author of TASH, an Ada binding to Tcl/Tk.
Visit the TASH web site at http://www.adatcl.com.
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