President Donald Trump fired the chief of the U.S. Copyright Office days after the release of a report that could have prevented artificial intelligence companies from training their models on copyrighted material without the creator’s permission.
Shira Perlmutter, who became director of the Copyright Office in 2020, was reportedly terminated by email. She was appointed to that role by Carla Hayden, who was herself fired by Trump from her post of librarian of Congress last week.
Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Newlen informed staff in an email that Perlmutter was fired by the White House on Saturday, according to The Washington Post. The termination has stoked fears among employees that they could be next.
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The Copyright Office last week released the third part of its landmark report, which focused on questions surrounding generative AI training and fair 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 agency wrote.
Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, speculated in a statement that “it is surely no coincidence” that Trump fired Perlmutter “less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”
Last month, Musk wrote on X that he agreed with calls to abolish intellectual property law. The tech mogul owns the AI startup xAI and tried unsuccessfully in February to purchase OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” Morelle said. “This action once again tramples on Congress’s Article One authority and throws a trillion-dollar industry into chaos. When will my Republican colleagues decide enough is enough?”
The American Federation of Musicians similarly blasted the termination of Perlmutter.
“Her unlawful firing will gravely harm the entire copyright community,” it said in a statement. “She 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.”
Last week, Trump fired Hayden, the first woman and first Black person to lead the Library of Congress. No reason was given for her termination, though the conservative group American Accountability Foundation branded her “woke” and “anti-Trump.”
“It’s time to get her OUT and hire a new guy for the job!” the group wrote on X, hours before Hayden’s firing was announced.
