President Trump fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office just two days after it posted a report suggesting that Big Tech's mass piracy of books, movies and other works to train AIs was copyright infringement. Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter is out; the firing is an "unprecedented power grab with no legal basis," writes one lawmaker.
The Verge's Wes Davis quotes an unsurprised professor:
University of Colorado law professor Blake Reid called the report a "straight-ticket loss for the AI companies" in a post prior to reports emerged that Perlmutter had been fired, writing that he wondered "if a purge at the Copyright Office is incoming and they felt the need to rush this out." Reid wrote that although the Copyright Office generally can't "issue binding interpretations of copyright law," courts turn to its expertise when drafting their opinions.
The report serves AI companies' interests in ways you won't see done for other blatant pirates—"Various uses of copyrighted works in AI training are likely to be transformative"—but it failed to go the final millimeter, and that was whole race:
"making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries."
The bottom line is that big tech companies want an exception to copyright law that allows them to get away with it. They don't think they'll get one through congress, infested as it is with proverbial Disney lobbyists, so the copyright office (cf. right to repair) is the first port of call.
Elon Musk owns a second-tier AI company and remains one of the several "brown eminences" in the White House; his interests may may account for how fast and peremptory Perlmutter's dismissal was.
Previously:
• Do AI images violate copyright? A lawyer explains the Stable Diffusion lawsuit
• AI artist appeals denial of copyright protection
• Federal judge says AI-generated artwork can't be copyrighted, because of monkeys
• Prompting AI doesn't get copyright in the output
• RIAA sues AI music startups over copyright infringement claims
• California judge dismisses parts of lawsuit targeting art-scraping AI
