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copyright
'A Brazen, Unprecedented Power Grab': Trump Fires Copyright Office Head
The reported firing of Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office Shira Perlmutter comes on the heels of Trump's dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.
May 12, 2025
The Trump administration reportedly fired the country's top copyright official, Shira Perlmutter, on Saturday, shortly after her office released the pre-publication version of a report that raised flags about training artificial intelligence models using copyrighted material.
Perlmutter's termination came two days after the White House abruptly fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who appointed Perlmutter to the role of Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office in 2020.
On Saturday, Perlmutter received a communication from the White House that she had been "terminated," according to Politico.
Other outlets have since reported that the Copyright Office confirmed her firing, though the White House appears to have not offered comment on the situation.
Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees the management of the Library of Congress, said in a statement on Saturday that Trump's termination of Perlmutter is "a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis."
"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," alleged Morelle, in reference to the recent report from Perlmutter's office.
While not all observers are convinced of the link drawn by Morelle, in a post on Sunday from the American Federation of Musicians labor union echoed Morelle, writing that Perlmutter "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."
Her "unlawful firing will gravely harm the entire copyright community," the union said.
The report, the latest in a series exploring the intersection of copyright law and AI, states that the "extent to which they are fair, however, will depend on what works were used, from what source, for what purpose, and with what controls on the outputs."
The report draws a distinction between using copyrighted works in AI training when it comes to research and analysis versus commercial use. "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 established fair use boundaries," according to the report.
AI models are generally trained by feeding them large amounts of data. Several news publishers have sued AI companies alleging their copyrighted content was used to train AI models, in cases that deal directly with fair use.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who owns an AI company called xAI, has been core to the Trump administration's efforts to slash federal spending and personnel through the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE has reportedly used AI as part of its efforts to reshape government.
In a post prior to news of Perlmutter's firing, University of Colorado law professor Blake Reid on Saturday said that the report is a "straight-ticket loss for the AI companies" and also mused whether a "purge" at the Copyright Office was incoming and whether "they felt the need to rush this out."
According to Reid, when it comes to the significance of the report, "the [Copyright] Office (with a few exceptions) doesn't have the power to issue binding interpretations of copyright law, but courts often cite to its expertise as persuasive."
Internet Archive to Appeal 'Chilling' Federal Ruling Against Digital Books
"For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books," said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. "This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors."
Mar 25, 2023
Internet Archive vowed to appeal after a U.S. district court judge on Friday sided with four major publishers who sued the nonprofit for copyright infringement.
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, Internet Archives operated a controlled digital lending system, allowing users to digitally check out scanned copies of purchased or donated books on a one-to-one basis. As the public health crises forced school and library closures, the nonprofit launched the National Emergency Library, making 1.4 million digital books available without waitlists.
Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House sued Internet Archive over its lending policies in June 2020. Judge John G. Koeltl of the Southern District of New York on Friday found in Hachette v. Internet Archive that the nonprofit "creates derivative e-books that, when lent to the public, compete with those authorized by the publishers."
A future in which libraries are just a shell for Big Tech's licensing software and Big Media's most popular titles would be awful—but that's where we're headed if this decision stands.
Internet Archive "argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet," the judge wrote. "But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers."
In a statement responding to the ruling, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle pledged to keep fighting against the publishers.
"Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books," Kahle said. "This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it."
Internet Archive's supporters have shared similar warnings throughout the ongoing court battle, including after the ruling Friday.
"In a chilling ruling, a lower court judge in New York has completely disregarded the traditional rights of libraries to own and preserve books in favor of maximizing the profits of Big Media conglomerates," declared Lia Holland, campaigns and communications director at the digital rights group Fight for the Future.
"We applaud the Internet Archive's appeal announcement, as well as their steadfast commitment to preserving the rights of all libraries and their patrons in the digital age," they said. "And our admiration is shared—over 14,000 people having signed our pledge to defend libraries' digital rights at BattleForLibraries.com this week alone."
Holland continued:
From a basic human rights perspective, it is patently absurd to equate an e-book license issued through a surveillance-ridden Big Tech company with a digital book file that is owned and preserved by a privacy-defending nonprofit library. Currently, publishers offer no option for libraries to own and preserve digital books—leaving digital books vulnerable to unauthorized edits, censorship, or downright erasure, and leaving library patrons vulnerable to surveillance and punishment for what they read.
In a world where libraries cannot own, preserve, or control the digital books in their collections, only the most popular, bestselling authors stand to benefit—at the expense of the vast majority of authors, whose books are preserved and purchased by libraries well after publishers have stopped promoting them. Further, today a disproportionate number of traditionally marginalized and local voices are being published in digital-only format, redoubling the need for a robust regime of library preservation to ensure that these stories survive for generations to come.
A future in which libraries are just a shell for Big Tech's licensing software and Big Media's most popular titles would be awful—but that's where we're headed if this decision stands. No book-lover who wants an equitable and trustworthy written world could find such a future desirable. Accordingly, we plan to organize an in-person action to demand robust ownership and preservation standards for digital books and libraries. For updates on when and where, check BattleForLibraries.com.
More than 300 authors last September signed an open letter led by Fight for the Future calling out publishers and trade associations for their actions against digital libraries, including the lawsuit targeting Internet Archive.
"Libraries saved my life as a young reader, and I've seen them do as much and more for so many others," said signatory Jeff Sharlet. "At a time when libraries are at the frontlines of fascism's assault on democracy, it is of greater importance than ever for writers to stand in solidarity with librarians in defense of the right to share stories. Democracy won't survive without it."
Fellow signatory Erin Taylor asserted that "the Internet Archive is a public good. Libraries are a public good. Only the most intellectually deprived soul would value profit over mass access to literature and knowledge."
Koeltl's ruling came just two days after the American Library Association released a report revealing that in 2022, a record-breaking 2,571 titles were challenged by pro-censorship groups pushing book bans, a 38% increase from the previous year.
Meanwhile, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday passed the so-called Parents Bill of Rights Act, which education advocates and progressive lawmakers argue is intended to ban books and further ostracize marginalized communities.
Open Access Groups Aim to Revolutionize Law Around Big Data in the Digital Age
By honoring new Declaration, 'research practices could be revolutionized and lives could literally be saved,' says IP expert
May 06, 2015
More than 50 organizations on Wednesday released the groundbreaking Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age, aimed at eliminating the barriers that stop humans from accessing and analyzing the "mountains of data" being produced each and every day.
"In the current era, we are producing data in far greater quantities than ever before," according to the Declaration's website--a full 90 percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years. "Harnessing the data deluge has been recognized as having the potential to help find solutions for some of society's biggest challenges, such as climate change, health and demographic change, depleting natural resources, and globalization."
"The right to receive and impart information and ideas is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but the modern application of IP law often limits this right, even when these most simple building blocks of knowledge are used."
--Association of European Research Libraries
However, it continues: "Whilst the benefits of access to data and the use of techniques such as Text and Data Mining (TDM) to analyze data have been widely acknowledged, the reality is that there are major barriers preventing access to and exploitation of data."
These issues, according to the groups behind the Declaration, include prohibitive intellectual property laws, a lack of legal certainty around copyright protections, a skills gap, and a lack of infrastructure for mining and sharing what the Declaration refers to as 'Big Data'.
According to a press release (pdf) from the Association of European Research Libraries, or LIBER, which led the drafting of the document, "[C]opyright was never designed to regulate the sharing of facts, data and ideas-nor should it. The right to receive and impart information and ideas is guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but the modern application of IP law often limits this right, even when these most simple building blocks of knowledge are used."
To combat such challenges, 25 global experts in everything from metadata mining to information sharing to contract law gathered in December 2014 to craft the set of principles now known as the Hague Declaration, which they believe "will help shape ethical research practice, legislative reform and the development of open access policies and infrastructure."
By achieving these goals, said LIBER president Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, "[r]esearch practices could be revolutionized and lives could literally be saved."
Among the Declaration's signatories is the non-profit organization Creative Commons--under whose Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License Common Dreams content is published--which said in a statement:
One of the key principles recognized in the declaration is that intellectual property law does not regulate the flow of facts, data, and ideas-and that licenses and contract terms should not regulate or restrict how an individual may analyze or use data. It supports the notion that "the right to read is the right to mine", and that facts, data, and ideas should never be considered to be under the protection of copyright. To realize the massive, positive potential for data and content analysis to help solve major scientific, medical, and environmental challenges, it's important that intellectual property laws and private contracts--do not restrict practices such as text and data mining.
Visit the Hague Declaration website for an infographic that illustrates both the problem, and what can be done to fix it.
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