Trump sacked Copyright Office director a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Musk’s plan to train AI models, top Dem says
- Rep. Joe Morelle has denounced President Trump’s removal of Shira Perlmutter as an unprecedented power grab, suggesting it was done following a report that found that AI companies sometimes breach copyright laws. Major AI firms like OpenAI, which Elon Musk cofounded, are facing ongoing lawsuits over alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted materials in their model training.
A top Democrat has called the recent firing of Director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, "a brazen, unprecedented power grab."
In a press release, Rep. Joe Morelle said: “Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models."
“Register Perlmutter is a patriot, and her tenure has propelled the Copyright Office into the 21st century by comprehensively modernizing its operations and setting global standards on the intersection of AI and intellectual property," he said in the statement, adding the action violates Congress’s Article One authority and risks throwing a trillion-dollar industry into chaos.
In the statement, Morelle pointed to a newly released draft from the U.S. Copyright Office—part three of a broader series—examining the intersection of intellectual property and AI.
The document warns that AI companies shouldn’t assume “fair use” automatically covers their training on copyrighted materials. However, it suggests that academic research and critical examination are permissible.
The report did not call for government intervention but it did note that mass commercial use of copyrighted works—particularly via unauthorized access—may exceed fair use limits.
The report said that "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."
Perlmutter has been in the role since October 2020, during the first Trump administration, and has advised Congress on copyright policy.
In a post on Facebook over the weekend, the American Federation of Musicians union said that Perlmutter's firing "will gravely harm the entire copyright community."
Representatives for the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
AI company's copyright issues
Copyright issues have long been a thorn in the side of leading AI companies, including OpenAI. The company is currently fighting several lawsuits accusing it of copyright infringement during the training of AI models.
In December 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the company of training ChatGPT on its articles without permission and alleging that the models reproduce large portions of its content.
Earlier that year, Getty Images filed suit against Stability AI—the company behind Stable Diffusion—claiming they ingested over 12 million protected photographs and metadata to build their AI image‐generation tools.
Recently, several tech companies and industry leaders have been pushing the Trump Administration to consider loosening intellectual property constraints for training data.
In its recent "AI Action Plan," OpenAI urged the U.S. government to codify “fair use” protections for AI development, calling for a copyright strategy that protects "American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material."
“America has so many AI startups, attracts so much investment, and has made so many research breakthroughs largely because the fair use doctrine promotes AI development,” OpenAI wrote.
Musk, who heads up the AI company behind Grok, has also supported a looser approach to intellectual property.
In a post on X last month, Musk threw his weight behind a statement from Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter (now X), that said, “delete all IP law.” In a reply, Musk said: “I agree.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com