Copyright Takes on the Coronavirus

Copyright may not save your life in an emergency, yet sustenance from fiction and nonfiction is welcome during life in lockdown.

Essential workers in the coronavirus crisis run the spectrum from EMTs and nurses to supermarket clerks and warehouse pick-and-packers.

Off hours, the essential activity for everyone is consuming content, from streaming movies and music to reading e-books borrowed online from the local public library.

The public’s prodigious appetite for content is making copyright essential, too, says Glenn Pudelka, president of the Copyright Society of the USA (CSUSA). Even while courthouses are shut for the pandemic, he notes, copyright attorneys are hard at work.

“You are still seeing people looking to register their works, still looking to protect their works. In fact, often in these types of crises or economic downturns, that’s when clients and content owners look to protect what they have even more,” Pudelka tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “They’re looking to ways to generate revenue or maintain revenues, so they look to their lawyers to help them protect things. So there’s lots going on in the copyright space.”

In the Boston office of Locke Lord, Pudelka is a senior counsel in the firm’s intellectual property department and co-chair of the firm’s trademark, copyright, and advertising group. Prior to joining the firm, he worked for eight years as a book editor for several publishing houses in New York City.