'Will gravely harm': Trump just fired another agency head in 'unprecedented power grab'

Eloise Goldsmith, Common Dreams
12 May
President Donald Trump in the White House Rose Garden on May 1, 2025 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian/Flickr)

The Trump administration reportedly fired the country's top copyright official, Shira Perlmutter, on Saturday, shortly after her office released the pre-publication version of a report that raised flags about training artificial intelligence models using copyrighted material.

Perlmutter's termination came two days after the White House abruptly fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who appointed Perlmutter to the role of Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office in 2020.

On Saturday, Perlmutter received a communication from the White House that she had been "terminated," according to Politico.

Other outlets have since reported that the Copyright Office confirmed her firing, though the White House appears to have not offered comment on the situation.

Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees the management of the Library of Congress, said in a statement on Saturday that Trump's termination of 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," alleged Morelle, in reference to the recent report from Perlmutter's office.

While not all observers are convinced of the link drawn by Morelle, in a post on Sunday from the American Federation of Musicians labor union echoed Morelle, writing that Perlmutter "understood what we all know to be true: human creativity and authorship are the foundation of copyright law—and for that, it appears, she lost her job."

Her "unlawful firing will gravely harm the entire copyright community," the union said.

The report, the latest in a series exploring the intersection of copyright law and AI, states that the "extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs."

The report draws a distinction between using copyrighted works in AI training when it comes to research and analysis versus commercial use. "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," according to the report.

AI models are generally trained by feeding them large amounts of data. Several news publishers have sued AI companies alleging their copyrighted content was used to train AI models, in cases that deal directly with fair use.

Billionaire Elon Musk, who owns an AI company called xAI, has been core to the Trump administration's efforts to slash federal spending and personnel through the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has reportedlyused AI as part of its efforts to reshape government.

In a post prior to news of Perlmutter's firing, University of Colorado law professor Blake Reid on Saturday said that the report is a "straight-ticket loss for the AI companies" and also mused whether a "purge" at the Copyright Office was incoming and whether "they felt the need to rush this out."

According to Reid, when it comes to the significance of the report, "the [Copyright] Office (with a few exceptions) doesn't have the power to issue binding interpretations of copyright law, but courts often cite to its expertise as persuasive."

From Your Site Articles