Trump cans copyright chief after she warns AI may not be ‘fair use’

President Donald Trump fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter on Saturday, just a day after her office said AI developers could be infringing copyright by vacuuming up protected works to train their models.

Perlmutter’s ouster, first reported by Politico, cements a broader leadership churn at the Library of Congress that began with the removal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on Thursday, the official who appointed Perlmutter in 2020. Together the firings wrest day-to-day control of U.S. copyright policy from an agency long insulated from White House politics and pulls it closer into the president’s orbit.

“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,” the report, released Friday, reads.

Current copyright law in general goes absurdly far beyond protecting the original creator

— gorklon rust (@elonmusk) May 12, 2022

The report — Part III of the Copyright Office’s artificial intelligence study — rejects industry arguments that ingesting entire libraries is no different from the way humans learn and calls out the “superhuman speed and scale” of generative systems that replicate works “beyond established fair use boundaries.” It concludes AI firms making commercial use of vast copyrighted corpora without permission risk liability at every stage — data scraping, training and output generation — and urges Congress to explore licensing regimes if voluntary deals stall.

By allowing that language to stand, Perlmutter broke from tech allies like Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley figures who see broad fair use protections as essential for developing cutting-edge models. Last month, Musk replied “I agree” to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s call to “delete all IP law.”

I agree

— gorklon rust (@elonmusk) April 11, 2025

Meanwhile, Trump amplified a post from conservative legal activist Mike Davis, who declared firing “100% unacceptable.”

“Now tech bros are going to attempt to steal creators’ copyrights for AI profits,” Davis wrote.

Davis, a former Senate Judiciary staffer and founder of the Article III project, has emerged as an influential voice in conservative legal circles and has been outspoken about what he sees as Big Tech’s theft of intellectual property.

The former register received a two-sentence email Saturday afternoon saying her position had been “terminated,” according to internal messages obtained by Politico. Trump administration officials have not offered a reason. Neither the White House nor the U.S. Copyright Office immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.

Perlmutter’s chapter on AI marked the first time the office laid out — in detail — why wholesale copying for machine learning may overstep fair use. The report argues that tech firms enjoy “imperfect” analogies to human study and that commercial mass copying without a license “forgoes the customary price” creators are owed.

Her firing lands amid an escalating legal clash between rights-holders and AI titans like OpenAI, Google and Stability AI, each already facing infringement suits that lean on the Copyright Office’s reasoning.

Democrats say the abrupt dismissal jeopardizes a century-old system designed to keep copyright enforcement out of partisan battles.

“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” New York Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, wrote in a statement. “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.”

Latest posts by Thomas English (see all)

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.