May 12 (UPI) — The Trump administration fired the United States’ top copyright official over the weekend, following the dismissal of the librarian of Congress late last week.
Rep. Joe Morelle, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, confirmed in a statement that Shira Perlmutter was let go Saturday as the director of the U.S. Copyright Office and Register of Copyrights.
Politico was the first to report on Perlmutter’s firing.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” Morelle, D-N.Y., said.
“Register Perlmutter is a patriot, and her tenure has propelled the Copyright Office into the 21st century by comprehensively modernizing its operations and setting global standards on the intersection of AI and intellectual property.”
Perlmutter’s firing came two days after the administration fired Carla Hayden, the first woman and first Black person to serve as the librarian of Congress, who oversees the register of Copyrights.
A day before she was let go, Perlmutter’s office released a long-awaited report on the use of copyrighted works and artificial intelligence, an industry that Elon Musk, a financial backer of President Donald Trump’s and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, is highly involved in.
The report raises questions and concerns about the use of copyrighted material and intellectual property to train generative AI systems.
Last month, Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, now X, called for the erasure of all intellectual property law, meaning removing protections such as patents and copyrights, from such works.
“I agree,” Musk, who bought Twitter and renamed it X, said in response.
Morelle, in his statement, said it was no coincidence that Perlmutter was fired “less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”
Musk owns artificial intelligence company xAI.
The American Federation of Musicians expressed its appreciation to Perlmutter in a statement on Sunday, saying she had “served the American people with unrivaled expertise for decades.”
“Her unlawful firing will gravely harm the entire copyright community,” the world’s largest organization of professional musicians said. “She 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.”
Hayden appointed Perlmutter to the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright Office in October 2020, according to her official biography.
