Earlier this week, the U.S. Copyright Office released a massive report that partially expressed support for content creators and raised concerns about how AI systems can utilize copyrighted materials in training. Shira Perlmutter, the head of the office, was fired by Donald Trump on Saturday, according to CBS News. The shooting also follows the layoffs of Carla Hayden, the head of Trump's Library of Congress, which is a division.
Pelmot has served as the copyright register since October 2020 in the first Trump administration. Hayden appointed her position, who was appointed director of the Library of Congress during Barack Obama's first term and served without interruption when the first President Trump was in office. Hayden, who had no explanation earlier this week, made significant efforts during her tenure to modernize and optimize the library’s systems.
Hayden's dismissal comes shortly after the right-wing “government oversight” group American Pargeinational Foundation aims to condemn Hayden's efforts to remove books about sexual identity from the library and invite Lizzo to play the crystal flute of former President James Madison in a concert in 2022.
Perlmutter also faces scrutiny from the group, the fact that she donates to the democratic political movement. AAF also apparently supports the “Three Strikes” rule for her support for the individual who have downloaded copyrighted materials on the Internet.
Apart from the recent AAF targeting Hayden and Perlmutter as the driving force for Trump’s action, it’s hard to see any other inflammatory incidents, but given that the Copyright Office’s recent report examines how generative AI models leverage copyright protections in their training data and potential harms to artists, creators, creators, creators and Copyright holders, timing can certainly be questioned.
To this end, New York-based Democratic Congressman Joe Morelle, a ranking member of the House Management Committee, is skeptical of Perlmutter's firing and questioning the motivation behind it. “Donald Trump terminated the copyright register and Shira Perlmutter is a rough, unprecedented power without legal basis,” he said in a statement. “His behavior is certainly not accidental after her efforts to deny rubber band Elon Musk's copyrighted work to mine for AI models.”
Musk recently endorsed the idea of deleting all intellectual property laws, an idea that has grown more support among technology CEOs who want to mine and leverage as much data as possible to train their AI models. Deleting these laws from books seems to be the fastest way for these companies to access the data they need, as this seems to be a “fair use” argument for using copyrighted materials, as training data may be flat. Suitably, one of the main conclusions of the Perlmutter Office’s report is that the use of copyrighted engineering to train commercial services “overtakes the established boundaries of reasonable use.”
