President Donald Trump dismissed Shira Perlmutter, the head of the U.S. Copyright Office. Joe Morelle, a member of the Committee on House Administration, criticized the dismissal as an unprecedented abuse of authority lacking any legal justification, suggesting it occurred shortly after Perlmutter declined to endorse Elon Musk’s plans to utilize copyrighted materials for AI model training at xAI, which owns the chatbot Grok, popular with X social media users.
Perlmutter had assumed leadership of the Copyright Office in 2020 during Trump’s first term, having been appointed by Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, who also faced Trump’s termination order this week. Additionally, Trump referenced the event on his social network, Truth Social, by sharing a post that voiced concerns over the implications for creators’ copyrights, further implicating Musk and his public push to avoid paying copyright fees to others for xAI’s use of their works.
Morelle pointed to a newly released pre-publication U.S. Copyright Office report addressing matters of copyright and artificial intelligence, which notes the challenges AI companies might face regarding the use of “fair use” as a defense when utilizing copyrighted works. The report states that while individual cases cannot be prejudged, utilizing large amounts of copyrighted content to create competing expressive content, particularly through unlawful means, exceeds established fair use boundaries.
The Copyright Office has encouraged the development of “licensing markets” for AI firms, like xAI, to pay copyright holders for access, and it advocates exploring alternative licensing strategies to mitigate market failures. AI firms, including OpenAI and xAI, are currently embroiled in multiple lawsuits over copyright violation allegations and have called for legal frameworks from the U.S. government that would afford them more flexibility through fair use. Musk, a competitor of OpenAI and the founder of xAI, has recently endorsed calls to eliminate intellectual property law entirely. Seemingly, rather than pay for the use of property he did not create, the billionaire instead wants to pay nothing, deeming their property to be his own.
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