Scientific documentation and copyright

Abstract

To be well-informed of the achievements of others is indispensable for all those who are engaged in research work. The task of the collection, storage and retrieval of Information is performed by informatics. This new discipline by itself has a sizeable special literature.

Those developments of copyright which have been codified in subsequent international agreements and conventions, more recently in the Stockholm agreement of 1967 or in Hungary in the Law-Decree III. of 1969, do certainly not tend deliberately to throw obstacles in the way of information so badly needed by the progress of science, yet this new appearance of copyright requires the reconsideration of whether or not the new boundaries of the legal protection of copyright will fall within the so far permitted sphere of information activites.

The study tends to point out that

1. the new formulation of copyright may not put serious obstacles in the way of continuing the existing practice of information services;
2. the Hungarian law-decree, as well as certain foreign (British, West German, Austrian, etc.) legal measures, which cast light upon the boundary between information demands and the legal protection of copyright, will be able to find solutions for the prevention of such conflicts.

In the author's opinion, in case of – still unexperienced – emergency, Hungarian legislation will find adequate solution without violating its international committments.