On Saturday, President Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the Director of the U.S. Copyright Office—via email. The move came one day after her office released a report calling out AI companies for using copyrighted material without permission.
The timing isn’t subtle.
What happened?
Perlmutter’s office had just dropped Part 3 of a major copyright and AI report.
It stated that companies like OpenAI and xAI might be violating copyright law by scraping and repurposing creative work to train AI models.
It pushed for licensing deals instead of relying on fair use claims.
Here’s a quote from the report: “Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them... goes beyond established fair use boundaries.” Translation: if you're training your AI on music, books, or art, you should probably be paying for it. And then she got canned. No reason was given. Just a termination email.
To add to the drama, this came right after Trump also fired the Librarian of Congress, who originally appointed her. Why it matters:
The Copyright Office’s stance directly challenges how most AI labs operate.
If their conclusions stick, this could: - Force OpenAI, xAI, and others to pay for the content they use - Slow down AI development due to licensing negotiations - Make it even harder for small startups to compete - Kill off open-source AI models that can’t afford access to high-quality training data It could even split the AI space in two: - Models trained on licensed, premium content - Cheaper models stuck with public domain scraps Reactions so far: - The music and publishing industries cheered the report - The American Federation of Musicians said her firing “will gravely harm the entire copyright community” - AI companies have gone quiet, likely waiting to see how this unfolds in court
What’s next?
Nobody knows yet.
The acting Librarian of Congress is holding the reins for now. But it’s clear we’re entering a fight over who controls the future of creativity—humans, or the machines learning from them.
