President Donald Trump has fired Shira Perlmutter, who leads the U.S. Copyright Office.
The firing was reported by CBS News and Politico, and seemingly confirmed by a statement from Representative Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee for House Administration.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” Morelle said. “It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”
Perlmutter took over the Copyright Office in 2020, during the first Trump administration. She was appointed by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who Trump also fired this week.
Trump alluded to the news on his social network Truth Social, when he “ReTruthed” a post from attorney Mike Davis linking to the CBS News article. (Confusingly, Davis seemed to criticize the firing, writing, “Now tech bros are going to attempt to steal creators’ copyrights for AI profits.”)
As for how this ties into Musk (a Trump ally) and AI, Morelle linked to a pre-publication version of a U.S. Copyright Office report released this week that focuses on copyright and artificial intelligence. (In fact, it’s actually part three of a longer report.)
In it, the Copyright Office says that while it’s “not possible to prejudge” the outcome of individual cases, there are limitations on how much AI companies can count on “fair use” as a defense when they train their models on copyrighted content. For example, the report says research and analysis would probably be allowed.
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“But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” it continues.
The Copyright Office goes on to suggest that government intervention “would be premature at this time,” but it expresses hope that “licensing markets” where AI companies pay copyright holders for access to their content “should continue to develop,” adding that “alternative approaches such as extended collective licensing should be considered to address any market failure.”
AI companies including OpenAI currently face a number of lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement, and OpenAI has also called for the U.S. government to codify a copyright strategy that gives AI companies leeway through fair use.
Musk, meanwhile, is both a co-founder of OpenAI and of a competing startup, xAI (which is merging with the former Twitter). He recently expressed support for Square founder Jack Dorsey’s call to “delete all IP law.”