US EditionTrump Fires US Copyright Chief After AI Fair Use Report
- On May 8, 2025, President Donald Trump dismissed Shira Perlmutter, who served as the U.S. Register of Copyrights, shortly after removing Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, from her position in Washington, D.C.
- The firing followed Perlmutter's refusal to approve Elon Musk's attempts to mine copyrighted works for AI training and came amid an ongoing legal review of AI and copyright issues begun in 2023.
- Perlmutter had led the Copyright Office since October 2020, appointed by former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, and recently oversaw a report examining fair use limits for AI companies using copyrighted content.
- The report warns it is premature to intervene now, emphasizes human creativity's central role in copyright, and states that using copyrighted works to train AI challenges established fair use boundaries, especially if access is illegal.
- Democrats criticized the firing as a brazen, unprecedented power grab lacking legal basis, and the removal implies a significant shift in government copyright policy under the Trump administration.
108 Articles
108 Articles
Two Men Claiming to Be Trump Appointees Blocked From Entering US Copyright Office
The men appeared at the US Copyright Office days after after the Trump administration fired its leader, who had just published a report about the use of copyrighted materials for AI training.
First they came for the Librarian, then they came after the Register of Copyrights
This is confusing. Trump retweeted a post by Mike Davis, the organizer of Article III, which is devoted to getting right wing judges installed in the courts. Davis actually says that scraping copyrighted materials from the web is not good. The CBS News...
Trump fires head of Copyright Office Shira Perlmutter
President Donald Trump fired the Director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, on Sunday. Perlmutter was appointed by the former Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, in 2020. In the days before this most recent firing, Trump also fired Hayden. The White House notified Perlmutter in an email, according to the Associated Press, writing, “Your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated …
Trump fires copyright chief after AI clash involving Musk
US President Donald Trump has removed Shira Perlmutter, head of the US Copyright Office, in a move critics say was politically motivated and legally dubious. Perlmutter, appointed in 2020 during Trump’s first term, was dismissed days after declining to support Elon Musk’s efforts to use copyrighted material for training artificial intelligence models. Representative Joe Morelle, ranking member of the House Administration Committee, called it “a …
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