Trump Removes Copyright and Library of Congress Leaders After AI Policy Rift

The Associated Press reported Monday that Trump had named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche acting Librarian of Congress, and associate deputy attorney general Paul Perkins as acting Register of Copyright. Blanche had represented Trump in his 2024 criminal trial before being named to the number two post at the Justice Department. Perkins is a veteran DOJ attorney.

The Copyright Office confirmed Sunday that Perlmutter received a one-sentence email notifying her “your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately.”

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No reason was provided for Perlmutter’s dismissal. But suspicion quickly fell on the substance of the report, which concluded that the unlicensed use of copyrighted material by AI companies, in most cases, would not qualify as fair use under the Copyright Act. The fair use claim has been raised by technology company defendants in dozens of lawsuits alleging copyright infringement over the use of protected works in training.

“The steps required to produce a training dataset containing copyrighted works clearly implicate the right of reproduction,” the report said. “Developers make multiple copies of works by downloading them; transferring them across storage mediums; converting them to different formats; and creating modified versions or including them in filtered subsets. In many cases, the first step is downloading data from publicly available locations, but whatever the source, copies are made—often repeatedly.”

Read more: Trump Administration Pushes EU to Delay AI Regulations

The Trump administration, with its close ties to leading U.S. technology companies, has made promoting U.S. supremacy in the development of artificial intelligence technology a key economic and political priority.  May in the technology community, notably including Elon Musk,  view restrictions on the use of copyrighted works for AI training as impediments to achieving that goal.

Although the views of the Copyright Office do not carry the weight of law, they often carry weight with courts considering copyright cases. Congress also frequently leans on the office for its expertise in developing copyright-related legislation.

At least a few of the dozens of pending AI-related lawsuits are nearing the point of rulings on the fair use question. One day before Perlmutter’s firing the court overseeing one of the most high-profile such cases, Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, held a hearing on a motion for summary judgment on a fair use claim, in which the judge expressed concern that AI-generated content could harm the market for the human-created works it was trained on. A ruling adverse to Meta in that case would be a serious setback to the fair use argument.

The Copyright Office report also threatens to muddle the U.S. message on AI and copyright abroad. U.S. technology companies, with the strong backing of the White House, have lobbied heavily in the U.K. and European Union against measures that could limit their ability to make free use of copyrighted works for AI training. If courts and Congress were to follow the report’s recommendations it could establish a de facto legal standard in the U.S. at odds with what the U.S. is advocating in other jurisdictions.