Trump sacked Copyright Office Director after she refused to rubber-stamp Musk’s plan to train AI models
In a press release, Rep. Joe Morelle said: “Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira 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.
In a post on Facebook over the weekend, the American Federation of Musicians union said that Perlmutter's firing "will gravely harm the entire copyright community."
Copyright issues have long been a thorn in the side of leading AI companies, including OpenAI. The company is currently fighting several lawsuits accusing it of copyright infringement during the training of AI models.
| by Anonymous | reply 2 | May 12, 2025 8:39 PM
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In December 2023, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the company of training ChatGPT on its articles without permission and alleging that the models reproduce large portions of its content.
Earlier that year, Getty Images filed suit against Stability AI—the company behind Stable Diffusion—claiming the company ingested over 12 million protected photographs and metadata to build its AI image‐generation tools.
Recently, several tech companies and industry leaders have been pushing the Trump administration to consider loosening intellectual-property constraints for training data.
In its recent "AI Action Plan," OpenAI urged the U.S. government to codify “fair use” protections for AI development, calling for a copyright strategy that protects "American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material."
“America has so many AI startups, attracts so much investment, and has made so many research breakthroughs largely because the fair use doctrine promotes AI development,” OpenAI wrote.
Musk, who heads up the AI company behind Grok, has also supported a looser approach to intellectual property.
In a post on X last month, Musk threw his weight behind a statement from Jack Dorsey, the cofounder of Twitter (now X), that said, “delete all IP law.” In a reply, Musk said, “I agree.”
| by Anonymous | reply 1 | May 12, 2025 8:39 PM
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