copyright law and inter-library loan - what's up?

Here we summarize the provisions of German copyright law as they apply to distributing copies of scientific work which has not been licenced by the library but received from another library (inter-library loan) or from another distributor. We refer to copyright law in its form of 2008. For a few more details, please, turn to the German version of this page.

some things are easy...

Copyrighted material can be sent to you by the library provided that

you can claim a "use according to § 53" and
delivery is by letter or FAX.

The "use according to § 53 UrhG" is what you usually can claim, it is a use

for your personal scientific use and/or
for your own personal science archive
with no intention to distribute or to make public
of just a few articles or small portions of a book

...and some are perhaps not what you desire or expect

The situation becomes picky when we talk about delivery in electronic form (email). This is lawful only under the combined condition of

there is "use according to § 53" and
the document is a faksimile, i.e. an analogue file, e.g. a FAX or a scan, but definitively not the publishers's pdf file of the article, and
the holder of the copyright (publisher) does not sell the file in an "obvious" way and under "fair conditions".

Clearly, the 3rd point with qualifications like "obvious" and "fair" is difficult to meet without risks. To be on the safe side, delivery of papers from inter-library loan by email should be avoided wherever possible.

The 2nd point however should be noted too: under no conditions within German copyright law can you expect to get digital (pdf) publisher's versions of articles through inter-library loan.