Blake Montgomery , The Guardian; Trump strikes a blow for AI – by firing the US copyright supremo
"Over the weekend, Donald Trump fired the head of the US copyright office, CBS News reported. Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, was sacked after she issued a report questioning AI companies’ growing need for more data and casting doubt on their expressed need to circumvent current copyright laws.
In a statement, New York Democratic representative Joe Morelle pointed specifically to Trump’s booster-in-chief Elon Musk as a motivator for Perlmutter’s firing: “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.”
Trump’s abrupt severing of the copyright chief from her job reminds me of the Gordian knot. Legend has it that Alexander the Great was presented with a knot in a rope tying a cart to a stake. So complex were its twistings that no man had been able to untie it of the hundreds who had tried. Alexander silently drew his sword and sliced the knot in two. The story is one of a great man demonstrating the ingenuity that would lead him to conquer the world. Alexander did solve the riddle. He also defeated its purpose. The cart is left with no anchor. Perhaps the riddle had taken on more significance than the original problem of keeping the cart in place, but that is a question for another day.
Trump may have cut through any thorny legal questions the copyright office had raised, but the vacuum at the head of the US’s copyright authority means that richer and better-connected players will run roughshod over copyright law in the course of their business. That may be what the president wants. The more powerful players in lawsuits over AI and copyright are undoubtedly the well capitalized AI companies, as much as I want artists to be paid in abundance for their creativity. These tech companies have cozied up to Trump in an effort to ensure a friendlier regulatory environment, which seems to be working if the firing of the copyright chief is any evidence. Lawsuits over how much AI companies owe artists and publishers for their surreptitious use of copyrighted material with an avowed lack of permission still abound, and both plaintiffs and defendants will be taking their cues from the US copyright office."
