The report appeared to play both sides. “The public interest requires striking an effective balance, allowing technological innovation to flourish while maintaining a thriving creative community,” it read. Still, it did push back on the fair use loophole many AI firms have used to train their LLMs. “Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with [content owners] in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” the report continued, per The Hollywood Reporter.
While the report was received well by creative executives, Perlmutter’s firing seems to be another indication of Trump’s willingness to erode institutions that get on the wrong side of his and his inner circle’s interests. An unnamed music policy leader, for example, told THR that the news was “very concerning. We’re in an existential panic, we’re trying to figure out what any of this means, is this open season and it’s a fair-use free-for-all?” New York congressman Joe Morelle also weighed in, calling the firing “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.”
So what does this all mean for the ongoing fight to protect intellectual property? The entertainment industry may have lost a few battles recently—Trump’s firing of librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last week also removed a safeguard against AI companies accessing that treasure trove of copyrighted information—but the war isn’t over. White House appointees Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves will be taking over the Copyright Office, neither of whom has been an unqualified champion for Big Tech in the past. THR notes that Perkins used to prosecute fraud while Nieves previously worked under House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan, who made a name for himself going after Big Tech. Todd Blanche, who’s replacing Hayden as librarian of Congress, has also assisted with the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google.
Still, this shakeup leaves copyright advocates on shaky ground. “The concern that this represents a reprioritization of creators and content developers is very real,” Lisa Alter, a copyright attorney, told THR. “Shira Perlmutter was a consummate intellectual property scholar, that’s what she did,” she continued. “And if the Library of Congress and copyright office are controlled by a rightwing political viewpoint instead, who says copyright protections wouldn’t be denied from material that’s not deemed to be appropriate by the current administration?”
