Hint: I never had any problems obtaining a scientific paper by directly contacting its author. Many of the papers are directly downloadable from author's pages.
Matt mentions that in his write-up, but then mentions that the IEEE is changing its status of allowing uploads on author's pages:
Some time in January, the IEEE apparently quietly revised its copyright policy to explicitly forbid us authors from sharing the "final" versions of our papers on the web
Some time in January, the IEEE apparently quietly revised its copyright policy to explicitly forbid us authors from sharing the "final" versions of our papers on the web