Trump fires director of U.S. Copyright Office, sources say

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Trump fires director of U.S. Copyright Office, sources say

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

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about artificial intelligence and expressed some concerns and questions about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology.

“It is an open question, however, how much data an AI developer needs, and the marginal effect of more data on a model’s capabilities,” the report read. “Not everyone agrees that further increases in data and test performance will necessarily lead to continued real world improvements in utility.”

CBS News has reached out to the White House for comment.

President Trump has been a major proponent of AI. Immediately after taking office, he announced a joint venture involving OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle that will invest up to $500 billion in private sector money to build artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Perlmutter had held the position since October 2020, during the first Trump Administration.

She was appointed to the post by now former Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who herself was fired by Mr. Trump on Thursday.

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.  

Last month, Musk took to his social media platform X

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for the abolition of intellectual property laws. Musk also owns AI startup xAI, with which in February he submitted a failed bid to purchase OpenAI, the company that operates ChatGPT. 

The U.S. Copyright Office, which has a staff of approximately 450 people, is a department of the Library of Congress. It is tasked with registering copyright claims, recording copyright ownership information and administering copyright law, among other things. 

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Scott MacFarlane

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Scott MacFarlane is CBS News’ Justice correspondent. He has covered Washington for two decades, earning 20 Emmy and Edward R. Murrow awards. His reporting has resulted directly in the passage of five new laws.

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