Ars Technica: In a wild time for copyright law, the US Copyright Office has no leader. “In May, Copyright Register Shira Perlmutter was abruptly fired by email by the White House’s deputy director of personnel. Perlmutter is now suing the Trump administration, alleging that her firing was invalid; the government maintains that the executive branch has the authority to dismiss her. As the […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/06/ars-technica-in-a-wild-time-for-copyright-law-the-us-copyright-office-has-no-leader/

Judge Declines To Immediately Block Trump’s Effort To Fire Register Of Copyrights
#News #Politics #DonaldTrump #ElectionLine #LibraryofCongress #ShiraPerlmutter #USCopyrightOffice

https://deadline.com/2025/05/trump-register-of-copyrights-shira-perlmutter-1236412633/

Writers Guild Of America East Calls For Reinstatement Of “Unlawfully Fired” Register Of Copyrights
#News #Politics #DonaldTrump #ElectionLine #RegisterofCopyrights #ShiraPerlmutter #WGAE #WritersGuildofAmericaEast

https://deadline.com/2025/05/writers-guild-of-america-east-copyright-register-firing-1236400701/

"Monday's lesson: Don't mess with librarians"

https://www.lawdork.com/p/dont-mess-with-librarians

#LibraryofCongress #Copyright #CarlaHayden #ShiraPerlmutter #resist

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – U. S. Copyright Office – Copyright.gov

Copyright and Artificial Intelligence

Since launching an initiative in early 2023, the Copyright Office has been examining the copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence (AI), including the scope of copyright in AI-generated works and the use of copyrighted materials in AI training. After hosting public listening sessions and webinars, the Office published a notice of inquiry in the Federal Register in August 2023, which received over 10,000 comments by December 2023.

The Office is issuing a Report in several Parts analyzing the issues, which will be published as they are completed and linked below.

Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
Copyright and Artificial Intelligence analyzes copyright law and policy issues raised by artificial intelligence (AI). This Report is being issued in three Parts. Part 1 was published on July 31, 2024, and addresses the topic of digital replicas. Part 2 was published on January 29, 2025, and addresses the copyrightability of outputs created using generative AI. On May 9, 2025, the Office released a pre-publication version of Part 3 in response to congressional inquiries and expressions of interest from stakeholders. A final version of Part 3 will be published in the near future, without any substantive changes expected in the analysis or conclusions.

Editor’s Note: The documents are online, but I also included them here at the end.

Read more: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence – U. S. Copyright Office – Copyright.govSource Links: Copyright and Artificial Intelligence | U.S. Copyright Office

Documents:
Part 1: Digital Replicas – https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-1-Digital-Replicas-Report.pdf
Part 2: Copyrightability – https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
Part 3: Generative AI Training (Prepublication) – https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf

#AI #artificialIntelligence #Congress #CopyrightOffice #Firings #Report #ShiraPerlmutter #Trump #USCopyrightOffice

Chaos At The Copyright Office: Trump’s Firing Of Register Shira Perlmutter Leaves Industry Wondering About Role Of AI Report And What Happens Next
#News #Politics #AI #CopyrightOffice #DonaldTrump #ElectionLine #ElonMusk #ShiraPerlmutter

https://deadline.com/2025/05/trump-fires-register-of-copyrights-1236393946/

While obviously I don't know what's going on in the grizzled piece of hamburger Trump calls his brain, I think the other shoe just dropped after Trump's bizarrely timed firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last Thursday. Why? Because Trump just also fired one of Hayden's key appointees, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, mere days after her office released a report considered unfavorable to Broligarch fascist-owned AI companies.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-director-of-u-s-copyright-office-shira-perlmutter-sources/

Trump fires director of U.S. Copyright Office, sources say

"Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement that Perlmutter's firing was "a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis."

Morelle speculated that there was "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," in reference to the report released by the Copyright Office this week.

Last month, Musk took to his social media platform X to seemingly express support for the abolition of intellectual property laws. Musk also owns AI startup xAI, with which in February he submitted a failed bid to purchase OpenAI, the company that operates ChatGPT."

I think most observers in the media simply presumed Trump's firing of now former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was absurd fascist culture war stuff; as highlighted by the fact that numerous pro-Trump propagandists took to the media to justify her removal by implying Hayden was putting "bad, woke books" into the hands of children somehow - a hilariously false accusation because the Library of Congress is a reference archive of published books in America, and does not loan books out to children (or anyone else either.) As I've pointed out numerous times before however, these nazis use the whole cow, and it's now clear that removing Hayden was a set up play to clear the path for Trump to then fire Perlmutter on behalf of the billionaire tech bro fascists who paid to put Trump in the White House; not the least of whom is Trump's "first buddy" Elon Musk.

I suspect that folks who haven't been following the AI bubble closely have no idea how much money all the same fascist tech billionaires who literally think sacrificing humanity to get AI-created "gods" is an acceptable tradeoff, and a wealthy investor class that controls much of American politics, ultimately have invested in this scam. We're talking billions, if not trillions of dollars here, and a Trump administration report indicating that there are problems with just letting these companies steal every creative work in human history to further this business model, threatens those investments. Trump has fired a lot of people, for far less lucrative reasons; I see no valid excuse for Trump's behavior here aside from bog standard corruption. This is a lawless president engaging in a retaliatory firing on behalf of his billionaire cult of AI donors. Given that context, I think we can safely assume that Trump's next pick for Librarian of Congress will pick a pro-AI Register of Copyrights and as Musk desires, all US intellectual property law is now in danger.

#Trump #ElonMusk #AI #Corruption #CopyrightLaw #DigitalFascism #Capitalism #CarlaHayden #ShiraPerlmutter #IPLaw #LLM #LibraryOfCongress #USPol