President Donald Trump fired Silla Permater, who heads the US Copyright Office.
The fire was reported by CBS News and Politico and appears to have been confirmed in a statement from Rep. Joe Morelle, a top Democrat on the House Management Committee.
“Silla Permatter, the end of Donald Trump’s copyright register, is a brave and unprecedented grab for power without legal basis,” Morell said. “It’s certainly not a coincidence that he acted within a day after she rejected the rubber stacking molds in her efforts to mine most of her copyrighted works to train AI models.”
Perlmutter took over the Copyright Bureau during the first Trump administration in 2020. She was appointed Congressional Librarian Carla Hayden, who also fired Trump this week.
Trump hinted at the truthful social news of his social networks when he “retreated” a post from lawyer Mike Davis linked to a CBS News article. (Confusingly, Davis appears to be criticizing the fire.
As for how this connects with Musk (Trump’s allies) and AI, Morell links to the pre-published version of the US Copyright Office Report released this week, focusing on copyright and artificial intelligence. (In fact, it’s actually part 3 of a long report.)
In it, the Copyright Bureau says that while it is “unable to prevent” outcomes in individual cases, there are enough restrictions that AI companies can expect to use “fair use” as a defense when training models with copyrighted content. For example, the report states that research and analysis may possibly be permitted.
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“However, commercially exploiting the enormous overwhelmingness of copyrighted works to produce competing expressive content in existing markets, especially when achieved through illegal access, transcends the boundaries of established fair use,” it continues.
The Copyright Bureau suggests that government intervention is “premature at this point”, but says that “licensing markets” that “should continue to develop” and “alternative approaches such as extended collective licensing should be considered to address market failures” for AI companies to access content.
AI companies, including Openai, are currently facing many lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement, and Openai is also asking the US government to codify a copyright strategy that gives AI companies room through fair use.
Musk, meanwhile, is also the co-founder of Xai (which has merged with former Twitter), a startup that competes with Openai. He recently expressed his support for Square founder Jack Dorsey’s call to “remove all IP laws.”