Paul Katzenberger

Urheberrecht und Naturwissenschaften

Works in the natural sciences are provided with comparatively less copyright protection than literary works. Nevertheless, this protection is important- for scientists. However, more recently, modern methods and techniques of information and documentation, such as reprography, microfilm archives, electronic data storage and retrieval, and data transmission have questioned the justification and effectiveness, even in principle, of this protection. A more detailed analysis demonstrates that this involves not so much a crisis of copyright law as a crisis of the entire field of scientific information.

Primary Publications and Modern Information Systems Copyright Problems from the Viewpoint of Editors of Scientific Journals

In the age of flood of information, secondary information systems seem to offer the needed control. Those systems, however, are supplemented by new means of supplying sceintists with the full text of the documented literature which, on the one hand, have become indispensable for the scientists’ work, but, on the other hand, are jeopardizing the economic basis of primary publishing. Insofar, particularly dangerous is the mailing of reprographic reproductions of journal articles on demand by libraries and documentation centers. Copyright law has to guarantee the economic basis of the likewise indispensable primary scientific literature. As to this, endeavours for copyright law reform in some countries are reported in this paper.