A week ago, Custom Copies, better known as Orange & Blue Textbooks, was sued.

Unfortunately, the lawsuit wasn't filed under Florida's anti-gouging laws. The bookstore was instead sued by six major publishers that accuse the textbook company of selling their copyright material without permission.

We think the lawsuit sounds more than a little shady.

The publishers say that since Spring 2003, OBT has committed 20 copyright violations when it copied excerpts from books and journals into its course packs.

But while the publishers' accusations aren't in question, their methods and motives are.

If the publishers were really concerned about money, they would've just sent OBT owner Kenneth Roberts a bill for the infractions.

The publishers' attorney, William Strong, explained. Sort of.

"We felt that it was important to send a message," he said. When prodded, he clarified: "I don't want to define what I mean by that."

So the publishers are suing because they want to send an as-yet-undefined message to Roberts.

Unsurprisingly, Roberts had a different take on the situation.

"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 indicated that he'd paid $175,000 in royalties in the past five years.

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

Roberts also said the violations make up only 1 percent of his copyright instances. That sounds like a pretty good record. And it also indicates that OBT doesn't have any reason to get shifty with so few copyrights.

So we're willing to take him at his word when he says the mistakes were all honest ones.

Jeffrey Harrison, a UF copyright law professor, suggested that the lawsuit might really just be a scare tactic against other course pack sellers. Publishers lose money when they don't receive royalties for course pack material. Maybe they want to make an example of OBT.

That makes sense, except that Roberts insists that it's unfeasible to get the error rate below 1 percent. If that's the case, we don't expect the publishers to have much success sending their message.

But we're still wondering who tipped the publishers off.

Once again, Roberts had some ideas. He maintains that a competing bookstore buys all of his course packs each year and sends them off to the publishers, which mercilessly scrutinize the packs for violations.

We can tolerate the lawsuits. They probably won't work, but if publishers really think lawsuits are the best way to settle copyright infringements, then that's their prerogative.

But we draw the line at local bookstores snitching on OBT just to drive the business out. If the rivals succeed, students will pay higher prices due to decreased competition among bookstores.

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