The GNU people believe otherwise. Besides, the fact that someone in Japan that I don't know about has a copy of the code on a floppy disk in a closet at his parents place isn't of much use to me if I want the source code for something to fix a bug that's bothering me.
If someone really depends and still uses code only still present in the world in a closet in Japan I guess he really should consider switching to another library that's for sure doing a better job on it somewere. I can understand what you say, but I still consider anarchy is a better system to keep free sofware alive. There is plenity of code licensed under the BSD license alive on the internet, and that license gives you absolute freedom to use and distribute it.
You should also consider that it's very probable you using that code decide to include it to you own project, giving it a second life, and making it possible to persist more time in history, you've copied and prolly published it again on the internet.
But I guess this is a delicate subject, and everybody has his personal oppinion.
I don't really care anybody using any piece of code I've contributed to simutrans anywere, given that they mention me. And for me, they can still not mention me, I don't really care, it's code I've published on the internet anyway.
I don't think algorithms should be a subject of patents too, they are just ideas anyway.