Earlier this week, the US Copyright Office issued a massive report in part expressing support for content creators and raising concerns about how artificial intelligence systems utilize copyrighted material in training. On Saturday, the head of that office, Shira Perlmutter, was fired by Donald Trump, according to CBS News. The firing also followed Trump’s axing of Carla Hayden, the head of the Library of Congress, of which the US Copyright Office is one department.
Perlmutter had served as the Register of Copyrights since October, 2020, during the first Trump administration. She had been appointed to the role by Hayden, who was appointed librarian of Congress during Barack Obama’s first term and served through the first Trump presidency without disruption. Hayden, who made significant efforts to modernize and optimize the library’s systems during her tenure, was fired without explanation earlier this week.
Hayden’s firing came shortly after the American Accountability Foundation, a right-wing “government oversight” organization, took aim at Hayden for denouncing efforts to remove books about sexual identity from libraries and for inviting Lizzo to play former President James Madison’s crystal flute at a concert in 2022.
Perlmutter also faced scrutiny from this group, taking issue with the fact that she had made donations to Democratic political campaigns. The AAF also apparently took issue with the fact that she supported a “three strikes” rule for individuals downloading copyrighted material on the Internet.
It’s hard to see any other inciting incident other than the AAF’s recent campaign against Hayden and Perlmutter as the impetus for Trump taking action, but the timing is certainly open to question given the Copyright Office’s recent report examining how generative AI models utilize copyrighted works within their training data and the potential harms that may cause to artists, creators, and copyright holders.
To that end, Democratic Congressperson Joe Morelle of New York, the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, took issue with Perlmutter’s firing and called into question the motivations behind it. “Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” he said in a statement. “It’s 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 recently endorsed the idea of removing all intellectual property laws, an idea that has growing support among tech CEOs who would like to mine and utilize as much data as humanly possible in order to train their AI models. Deleting those laws off the books seems like the quickest way for these companies to access the data they want, as it seems the “fair use” argument for using copyrighted material as training data may fall flat. Fittingly, one of the major conclusions of the report from Perlmutter’s office was that the use of copyrighted works to train commercial services “goes beyond established fair use boundaries.”
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