Trump fires Copyright Office director after report raises questions about AI training
President Donald Trump has fired Shira Perlmutter, who leads the American copyright office.
The firing was reported by CBS News And Politicsand apparently confirmed by A statement from representative Joe MorelleThe top democrat in the home administration committee.
“Donald Trump’s termination of the copyright register, Shira Perlmutter, is a brutal, unprecedented grip of power without a legal basis,” said Morelle. “It is certainly no coincidence that he acted less than a day after she refused to take the efforts of Elon Musk to deprive troves or copyright protected works to train AI models.”
Perlmutter took over the copyright office in 2020 during the first Trump administration. She was appointed by librarian of the Carla Hayden congress, who Trump also shot this week.
Trump referred to the news about his social network Truth Social, when he “withdrew” A message from lawyer Mike Davis Linking to the CBS news article. (Confusing Davis seemed to criticize firing and wrote: “Now Technical Bros are going to try to steal the copyright of makers for AI win.”)
Regarding how this fits in with Musk (a Trump bondmate) and AI, Morelle connected to A pre-publication version of a US Copyright Office report This week released that focuses on copyrights and artificial intelligence. (In fact, it is actually part three of a longer report.)
In it the Copyright Office says that although it is “not possible to biased the outcome of individual cases”, there are limitations to how many AI companies can count on “reasonable use” as a defense when they train their models on copyright content. For example, the report says that research and analysis would probably be allowed.
“But making commercial use of huge points of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially when this is achieved through illegal access, goes beyond the established limits of reasonable use,” it continues.
The copyright agency further suggests that government intervention “would be premature at the moment”, but it publishes the hope that “license markets” in which AI companies must continue to develop copyright holders for access to their content “, adding that” alternative approaches such as extensive collective licensies should be considered. “
AI companies, including OpenAI, are currently confronted with a number of lawsuits that accuse them of copyright infringement, and OpenAi has also called on the US government to codify a copyright strategy that AI companies give play space through fair use.
Musk is now both co-founder of OpenAi and a competing startup, Xai (who merges with the former Twitter). He recently expressed support for the call from Square founder Jack Dorsey to ‘remove all IP legislation’.
