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First Trump fired the Librarian, then he came after the Register of Copyrights with AI at stake [1]

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Date: 2025-05-12

This is confusing. Trump retweeted a post by Mike Davis, the organizer of Article III, which is devoted to getting right wing judges installed in the courts.

Davis actually says that scraping copyrighted materials from the web is not good. The CBS News article recounts how Perlmutter had been appointed by the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, who got fired days before Perlmutter.

Perlmutter had put out a preliminary report that said AI use of copyrighted material was a problem. What is Trump saying here? He thinks AI will save the U.S. economy. Why would he retweet Davis's negative comment? Other reporters had the same problem

The real Truth is that Trump wants to give Musk everything he needs. Rep. Joe Morelle, the ranking member of the House Administration Committee said that there was "...surely no coincidence he acted less than the day after she refused to rubber stamp Elon Musk's efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models."

After taking office, Trump announced the initiative that OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank would be spending $500 billion in building AI infrastructure.

But Elon Musk's company xAI was left out of the mix. Why?

The US Copyright Office has 450 employees, and it operates underneath the Library of Congress.

Here's the 113 page report titled (PDF): "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence - Part 3: Generative AI Training."

It pretty much says that stealing copyrighted material for training is a very difficult legal problem. This was supposed to be a discussion of the matter, not a final ruling as to how copyrights are to be handled by AI.

In the report's conclusions were that "fair use" status of AI Training ​​​​​"will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose and with what controls on the outputs. Research and scholarship may be fair uses but others may not be: Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works, to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond fair use boundaries."

It is now confirmed that Perlmutter has been fired, according to a Library of Congress internal communication obtained by Politico. It was the typical two sentence termination notice by email.

Rep. Joe Morelle added, "This action once again tramples Congress's Article 1 Authority and throws a trillion dollar industry into chaos. When wiill my Republican colleagues decide enough is enough?"

"Register Perlmutter is a patriot, and her tenure has propelled the Copyright Office into the 21st century by comprehensively modernizing it's operations and setting global standards on the intersection of AI and intellectual property."

Both Hayden and Perlmutter's firing had been demanded by the American Accountability Foundation, a right wing think tank dedicated to blocking Biden's appointments, and getting rid of "deep state" bureaucrats

Tom Jones, the president of AAF told The Daily Mail at the end of April, "The President and his team have done an admirable and long needed job cleaning out all the deep state liberals from the federal government. It is time they show Carla Hayden and Shira Perlmutter the door and return an America First agenda to the nation's intellectual property regulation."

I'm not at all sure what "America First" relates to here. Maybe it's about the Chinese grand theft of everything, including fake knock-offs of Gucci bags as well as military secrets and copying movie disks.

The preliminary AI report hadn't come out yet when AAF called for Hayden and Perlmutter to be fired. Either the Trump administration followed AAF's recommendation, or Trump planned it all along. AAF is a heavy pusher of Project 2025. There are sections on the U.S. Agency for Global Media and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But nothing about intellectual property showing in the index.

Speculation is that the report came out because it would have been disappeared after Perlmutter's firing and she knew what was coming.

As Morelle said, it is now chaos in the Library of Congress, and the Copyright Office. Trump hacks haven't been chosen yet. The Librarian has to be confirmed by Congress, and then the Librarian appoints the Register of Copyrights.

Morelle calls it still another power grab by Trump. He's probably right. Why would Trump bother if there wasn't a plan?

It's a blow to individuals who write, create music, create videos, and images, as well as large corporations that produce TV shows and movies.

What could go wrong?

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