Electronic Document Delivery in the framework of the EU Copyright Directive

The protection of intellectual property is an old and very important right. Intellectual property embraces multiple fields such as literature, art, music, industrial patents, performances and so on. Every year the lack of application of this right produces an enormous loss of revenue as well as jobs. At the moment, the absence of a worldwide legislation makes it impossible to fight this phenomenon efficiently. In this work we discuss the problem of the Document Delivery Service, i.e. the partial reproduction and transmission of papers extracted from journals, conference proceedings or other collections of scientific articles, performed between libraries on behalf of researchers and students. In particular, we analyze the Document Delivery via Internet in the framework of the European Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council, published on May 22, 2001.