The Trump administration has fired Shira Perlmutter, the prior register of copyrights and director of the US Copyright Office, by email—according to reports from The Washington Post and Tech Crunch.
A statement from US democrat representative Joe Morelle alleges that the termination is a "brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis" and, in the representative's view, "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."
"Register Perlmutter is a patriot, and her tenure has propelled the Copyright Office into the 21st century by comprehensively modernizing its operations and setting global standards on the intersection of AI and intellectual property" says Morelle.
Morelle linked a pre-publication version of a US Copyright Office report [PDF warning] on copyright and artificial intelligence in his statement, in which the office states that there are limitations on how much AI companies can count on fair use as a defence when training models on copyrighted content.
OpenAI, co-founded by Musk, and Meta are currently facing a number of lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement, including one involving comedian Sarah Silverman and two other authors alleging that pirated versions of their works were used to train AI language models without their permission. Meta has argued that such usage falls under fair use doctrine.
Musk, meanwhile, has recently expressed support for ex-Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's call to "delete all IP law." Musk is also the co-founder of xAI, an artificial intelligence company responsible for the Grok AI chatbot integrated within X—and the owner of Collosus, a massive multi-GPU supercomputer built to train the latest version of the unfortunately-named chatbot.
Perlmutter was appointed into her previous role in 2020 during the previous Trump administration by librarian of congress Carla Hayden, who Trump also fired earlier this week by email.
So, it appears that the Trump administration is in the process of clearing house. Meanwhile, the argument as to whether training AI models on copyrighted works counts as fair usage continues, and probably will for some time.
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