problems copying files to cd

[hopeless]

I work for a small charity; we have been saving newspaper articles, mainly from the newspapers own websites. We now have over 3000 of these files saved in the hard drive. We want to copy them on to CD, to enable different people to use them to write articles from home. The problem we have is that different people (with differing levels of expertise) have saved the files. When we try to copy the files to CD we get a message saying that a lot of file names are illegal and cannot be copied, I assume that they mean they are too long. Can anyone suggest a way round this or a program that will let us copy the files as they are? As it will be impossible to sit down and copy them individually. Thanks for your help