On Friday, the US Copyright Office released a draft of a report finding that AI companies broke the law while training AI. The next day, the agency’s head, Shira Perlmutter, was fired — and the alarm bells are blaring.
The report’s findings were pretty straightforward. Basically, the report explained that using large language models (LLMs) trained on copyrighted data for tasks like “research and analysis” is probably fine, as “the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training.” But that changes when copyrighted materials (like books, for example) are used for commercial applications — particularly when those applications compete in the same market as the original works funneled into models for training. Other examples: Using an AI that gets trained on copyrighted journalism, in order to create a news generation tool, or using copyrighted artworks, in order to then create art to sell. That type of use likely breaches fair use protections, according to the report, and “goes beyond established fair use boundaries.”
The report’s findings seem to strike a clear blow to frontier AI companies, who have generally taken the stance that everything ever published by anyone else should also be theirs.
OpenAI is fighting multiple copyright lawsuits, including a high-profile case brought by The New York Times, and has lobbied the Trump Administration to redefine copyright law to benefit AI companies; Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stance that others’ content isn’t really worth enough for his company to have to bother compensating people for it; Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Twitter-buyer-and-rebrander Elon Musk agreed recently that we should “delete all IP law.” Musk is heavily invested in his own AI company, xAI.
Clearly, an official report saying otherwise, emerging from the US federal copyright-enforcement agency, stands at odds with these companies and the interests of their leaders. And without a clear explanation for Perlmutter’s firing in the interim, it’s hard to imagine that issues around AI and copyright — a clear thorn in the side of much of Silicon Valley and, to that end, many of Washington’s top funders — didn’t play a role.
As The Register noted, after the report was published, legal experts were quick to catch how odd it was for the Copyright Office to release it as a pre-print draft.
“A straight-ticket loss for the AI companies,” Blake. E Reid, a tech law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a Bluesky post of the report’s findings.
“Also, the ‘Pre-Publication’ status is very strange and conspicuously timed relative to the firing of the Librarian of Congress,” Reid added, referencing the sudden removal last week of now-former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who was fired on loose allegations related to the Trump Administration’s nonsensical war on “DEI” policies.
“I continue to wonder (speculatively!),” Reid continued, “if a purge at the Copyright Office is incoming and they felt the need to rush this out.” Reid’s prediction was made before the removal of Perlmutter, who was named to her position in 2020.
To make matters even more bizarre, Wired reported that two men claiming to be officials from Musk’s DOGE squad were blocked on Monday while attempting to enter the Copyright Office’s building in DC. A source “identified the men as Brian Nieves, who claimed he was the new deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, who said he was the new acting director of the Copyright Office, as well as acting Registrar,” according to the report.
The White House has yet to speak on why Perlmutter was fired, and whether her firing had anything to do with Musk and DOGE. It wouldn’t be the first time, though, that recent changes within the government have benefited Musk and his companies.
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