The reported firing of Register of Copyrights and director of the US Copyright Office Shira Perlmutter comes on the heels of Trump’s dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

The Trump administration reportedly fired the country’s top copyright official, Shira Perlmutter, on 10 May, shortly after her office released the pre-publication version of a report that raised flags about training artificial intelligence models using copyrighted material.

Perlmutter’s termination came two days after the White House  abruptly fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who appointed Perlmutter to the role of Register of Copyrights and Director of the US Copyright Office in 2020.

On 10 May, Perlmutter received a communication from the White House that she had been “terminated”, according to Politico.

Other outlets  have since  reported that the Copyright Office confirmed her firing, though the White House appears to have not offered comment on the situation.

Representative Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees the management of the Library of Congress, said in a statement that Trump’s termination of Perlmutter was “a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis”.

“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,”  alleged Morelle, in reference to the recent report from Perlmutter’s office.

While not all observers are  convinced of the link drawn by Morelle, in a post on 11 May from the American Federation of Musicians labour union echoed Morelle, writing that Perlmutter “understood what we all know to be true: human creativity and authorship are the foundation of copyright law – and for that, it appears, she lost her job.”

Her “unlawful firing will gravely harm the entire copyright community”, the union said.

The report, the latest in a series exploring the intersection of copyright law and AI, states that the “extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs”.

The report draws a distinction between using copyrighted works in AI training when it comes to research and analysis versus commercial use. “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,” the report said.

AI models are generally trained by feeding them large amounts of data. Several news  publishers have  sued AI companies alleging their copyrighted content was used to train AI models, in cases that deal directly with fair use.

Billionaire  Elon Musk, who owns an AI company called xAI, has been core to the Trump administration’s efforts to slash federal spending and personnel through the  Department of Government Efficiency.  DOGE has  reportedly  used AI as part of its efforts to reshape government.

In a post prior to news of Perlmutter’s firing, University of Colorado law professor Blake Reid said the report was a “straight-ticket loss for the AI companies” and also mused whether a “purge” at the Copyright Office was incoming and whether “they felt the need to rush this out”.

According to Reid, when it comes to the significance of the report, “the [Copyright] Office (with a few exceptions) doesn’t have the power to issue binding interpretations of copyright law, but courts often cite to its expertise as persuasive”.

Republished from Common Dreams, 12 May 2025