Trump fires head of US Copyright Office stoking fears about deregulation of AI

President Trump fired the nation’s top copyright official — a move that critics say threatens the independence of the US Copyright Office and could upend efforts to regulate artificial intelligence companies’ use of protected material.Shira Perlmutter, who has served as register of copyrights since 2020, was informed Saturday afternoon that her employment had been “terminated,” according to internal communications from the Library of Congress reviewed by Politico.Her dismissal comes just two days after the White House fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the official responsible for appointing and overseeing the Copyright Office.Hayden, who was confirmed by the Senate in 2016 for a 10-year term, had appointed Perlmutter.Neither dismissal came with a formal explanation, but lawmakers are already drawing connections between Perlmutter’s ouster and a recent Copyright Office report that questioned the legality of how artificial intelligence companies use copyrighted content to train generative models — a core business issue for Elon Musk, a longtime Trump ally.“It is no coincidence [Trump] acted less than a day after [Perlmutter] refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models,” said Rep.Joe Morelle (D-NY), the ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which has oversight of the Library of Congress and the Copyright Office.Perlmutter’s office had just released a detailed report on copyright and artificial intelligence, the third installment in an ongoing series examining the legal and economic implications of AI-generated content.While the report stopped short of recommending immediate regulatory action, it cast doubt on the sweeping “fair use” defenses that many AI firms rely on to justify scraping copyrighted materials.“But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where...