President Donald Trump’s administration filed an “emergency” Supreme Court plea to remove the register of copyrights at the Library of Congress, which had refused to support the plans of AI companies owned by his billionaire supporters.
In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Trump lacked the authority to remove Shira Perlmutter because she worked for Congress, not the executive branch. Trump first tried to fire Perlmutter in May after she released a pre-publication version of the third part of the Copyright Office’s report “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence,” which suggested that AI companies could be infringing on copyrighted works.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25) said at the time of her firing. “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.”
The pre-release of the copyright report stated that “the copying involved in AI training threatens significant potential harm to the market for or value of copyrighted works.”
