Alligator Online

A local copy shop was sued Wednesday by six major publishers, which accuse the company of selling their material without permission.

Custom Copies President Kenneth Roberts said the publishers are exploiting what amounts to human error on behalf of his employees in order to push him out as competition.

William Strong, the Boston attorney representing the publishers, said "pirates" like Custom Copies cost his clients a lot of money.

"The publishers suffer a lot when this kind of thing happens," he said, adding that the evidence he has against Custom Copies is probably "the tip of the iceberg."

Typically, when professors want to put together course packs, they notify the textbook retailer, which compiles a bibliography and sends it to an intermediary, Copyright Clearance Center Inc. That company, based in Danvers, Mass., buys the copyrights from each publisher and compiles the royalty fees into one bill that it sends to the retailer.

The publishers suing Custom Copies claim that, in 20 instances since Spring 2003, it skipped that intermediate step and printed excerpts from books, journals and other publications without paying royalties.

In 2003, Roberts settled a copyright lawsuit filed by three publishers, two of which are named in this suit.

"We've known for years that we're under a microscope," he said. "With that knowledge, there is no way in hell that we would ever deliberately violate a copyright."

Roberts said he has paid $175,000 in royalties over the last five years.

"If I paid $175,000," he noted, "why in the hell would I want to chintz on a couple hundred dollars?"

The 20 violations he is accused of make up 1 percent of the total copyright instances his company deals with, he said. His student employees, when sending bibliographies out to be billed, sometimes forget to include an item in the bibliography. He said no publishing company asked him to pay money he owed - which he said he would have - before filing suit.