Comment by bl33pd

Isn’t that what preprints are for? My limited experience was that authors have an essentially identical preprint version they submitted and happily share them with collaborators or typically on request. Conventionally people did that before sci-hub which is normative now for researchers who aren’t subject to extreme compliance requirements, but it’s still done.

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.