Universal Edition, Edition Wilhelm Hansen (now part of Wise Music Classical, I think) and Boosey & Hawkes are examples of publishers who have put up a lot of scores by 20th century composers for free. The Finnish Music Information Centre website has many scores by Finnish composers of recent decades.
With regard to pirated scores, that mainly happened on filesharing networks like Soulseek and DC++.
> almost never get something for niche composers in the last 10 to 20 years.
Why don’t you just write to them and ask for a PDF? As you know, composers are usually happy to hear of any interest in their music, and (just like academics and their research papers) they don’t always agree with their scores being “behind a paywall” for personal use.
