Donald Trump‘s abrupt firing of the head of the U.S. Copyright Office has generated confusion and doubt over his ability to terminate her, and also speculation about the role that a long-awaited report on AI may have played in his action.
Shira Perlmutter, who had been register of copyrights and director of the Copyright Office since 2020, was informed over the weekend that she was fired, according to sources familiar with what happened. The White House on Thursday fired the woman who appointed her, Librarian Of Congress Carla Hayden, who was named to the post by President Barack Obama.
This morning, two men delivered a letter to the Copyright Office with a letter stating that Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, would be appointed the acting librarian of Congress, according to a source. They also showed a separate email stating that Brian Nieves, a Justice Department official, was appointed deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, the associate deputy attorney general, was appointed acting register of copyrights and director of the office. They were not allowed into the office and left this morning, as officials at the office are awaiting direction from Congress as it is a legislative branch agency, the source said.
Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, which oversees the library, said in a statement that Perlmutter’s firing is a “brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis.”
“This action once again tramples on Congress’s Article One authority and throws a trillion-dollar industry into chaos,” Morelle said. “When will my Republican colleagues decide enough is enough?”
Morelle also claimed that it was “surely no coincidence” that Perlmutter was fired a day after the release of a report on the use of copyrighted materials to train generative AI models. That is the source of a raging debate between the content and tech industries, as AI companies have defended their use of material by claiming that it is a “fair use.”
The report was rather nuanced in conclusions over when the use of protected content in training models may infringe on copyright and when it may not.
Entertainment attorney Aaron Moss, in his Copyright Lately blog, wrote, “For creators and rights holders pushing back against unauthorized AI training, it offers a detailed—and often forceful—rebuttal to sweeping fair use defenses.”
He added that “whether courts will adopt the Office’s reasoning—or whether the report will even remain official policy under new leadership—is very much an open question.”
Courts weigh a number of factors in judging whether the context of a work is fair use, so it was hardly surprising that the AI report did not establish bright lines over the use of copyrighted content. The report did state that “making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries.” The report found that government intervention was “premature,” and that licensing markets should continue to development.
Morelle, though, said that it was “surely no coincidence” that Perlmutter was fired “less than a day after she refused to rubber stamp Elon Musk‘s effort to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.” Last month, Twitter’s co-founder Jack Dorsey wrote on X, “Delete all IP law,” and Musk replied “I agree.”
Whether Perlmutter’s firing was related to the AI report is unclear, as the Trump administration has been purging officials throughout the government and installing the president’s loyalists. Perlmutter was appointed during Trump’s first term, but she was selected by Hayden, one of Obama’s nominees. The White House did not return a request for comment.
