Trump administration reportedly fires the head of the US Copyright Office as it tries to tackle AI's use of copyrighted materials

US President Donald Trump speaks during a photo opportunity with autoracing officials and champions on the South Portico of the White House on April 9, 2025, in Washington, DC. US President Donald Trump abruptly backed down Wednesday in his global trade war with a 90 day tariff pause for most countries -- but slapped even more levies against China in what has become a brutal duel between the world's two largest economies. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images) — (Image credit: Getty Images)

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."

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.

Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since. Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer, Andy spends his time jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows, all the while reviewing every bit of PC gaming hardware he can get his hands on. You name it, if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it, with opinions and everything.

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