John Wiley & Sons and two units of Elsevier Science have reached a settlement in the copyright infringement complaint filed in federal district court in Boston last November (News, Nov. 19, 2001) against Kessler-Hancock Information Services Inc., a small document delivery service in Davis, Calif. Coordinated by the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), a licensing agent for both publishers, the suit was not of the magnitude of those brought against Kinko's and Texaco in the early 1990s, but the reverberations are already starting to be felt.
"When we filed it, we saw an almost immediate response from people in the industry calling us and asking about compliance," said Bruce Funkhouser, CCC v-p of business operations and international. "We saw some customers who had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth come back. In many cases, they were aware of Kessler-Hancock." Funkhouser regards Kessler-Hancock, which collected copyright fees but in many instances did not return them to the copyright holders, as "the most egregious example of a lax attitude toward copyright deliverance."
Because copyright compliance in the U.S. is voluntary, Funkhouser does not rule out additional suits in the near future. "If you don't pursue copyright infringers reasonably aggressively," he said, "they're going to decide it doesn't matter. Copyright clearance is not just for the big guys."
For his part, Brian Hancock, owner of Kessler-Hancock, acknowledged that "it is certainly a situation where the publishers had some legitimate concerns. I'm very sorry for what happened here. We depend on publishers."
Hancock said he has already moved to make some of the changes mandated by the settlement at the time the suit was filed. However, Kessler-Hancock's legal troubles do not end with the resolution of the Wiley and Elsevier complaint. Former partner Greg Kessler, who pleaded no contest earlier this year in California criminal court to one count of grand theft and embezzlement while at Kessler-Hancock, is awaiting sentencing.
