”The Serpent in the Garden of Eden”

Intellectual property in the Digital Millennium

Abstract

Disposition of the scientifi c information and document supply, conceived in the form known after World War II, evolved in the interaction of the different structures of the scientifi c information and documents, is defi nitely in the digital phase today. New technologies have provided quite revolutionary changes and on the other hand, social, cultural and philosophical contours of the science – as communication, evaluation, intellectual property, ethics etc, remain in classic forms, which implies many irregularities in our everyday activities. New copyright laws in the digital era and implications of these laws in national legislation (USA, EC, Serbia) predict some of them. Situation in the fi eld, however, reveals abundance of controversy concerning scientifi c document supply. The last decade certainly records fall in the Document supply and an apparent dominance of other types of access to scientifi c information and documents, which in our practice are retrospective conversion of serials, massive digitization of books and various forms of open access. This has led to radical changes in the approach to scientific information, but also to quite different situations in the fi eld of intellectual property. Consortia’s licenses represent an important and delicate instance of copyright, concerning supply of scientifi c documents. This paper systematizes legal and ethical moments in the implication of copyright in the modern scientifi c supply documents and gives some answers on the contemporary practice in the world.