The Trump administration has fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, two sources familiar with the situation confirmed to CBS News Saturday.
The firing of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter came after Perlmutter and her office earlier this week issued part three of a lengthy report about artificial intelligence and expressed some concerns and questions about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology.
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Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, said in a statement that Perlmutter’s firing was “a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis.”
Morelle speculated that there was “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,” in reference to the report released by the Copyright Office this week.
So does copyright law change because of this?
The Copyright Office does not have the authority to enforce laws; only judges and Congress at the federal and state levels can do so.