The Copyright Clearance Center is coordinating a lawsuit filed in federal district court in Gainesville, Fla., against Custom Copies & Textbooks and its president, Kenneth F. Roberts. John Wiley & Sons Inc., the MIT Press and Elsevier Science Inc. together are suing CCT for repackaging materials for coursepacks without receiving permission.
The Gainesville company, which is located just a few blocks from the local University of Florida campus, is alleged to have distributed these materials to students at the school. The plaintiffs say that they still don't know the depth of the alleged operation and expressed surprise that such practices still exist. "After the Kinko's case of a few years ago, it surprises us that copy shops so close to campus still operate like this," said Elsevier v-p and general counsel Mark Seeley, referring to the 1991 New York federal district court ruling that found Kinko's Graphics Corp. guilty of copyright infringement for creating coursepacks.
Most copy shops today do in fact obey the law, according to CCC general counsel Frederic Haber. "CCC has thousands of customers in the coursepack business, either copy shops or university printing centers, or occasionally the professors will do it himself or herself, and many of them are conscious of their obligations to pay for the replication of materials," he said. However, when the CCC obtains materials indicating that permission has not been obtained, it presents the materials to the affected publishers, who then decide whether they will file charges.
The company, which according to its profile, "was founded to address the absence of a full-service copy center devoted exclusively to service the coursepack needs of the University of Florida," has not responded to the allegations. "We have no comment," Roberts told PW.
