Why did Donald Trump fire the top copyright official in the US? Oh.
Shira Perlmutter lost her job last Friday (May 9). She was the senior official in the United States when it came to copyright. Last week, her office released an early version of a report on how copyright can exist with artificial intelligence, something that governments around the world are studying.
To my eyes, it seems to be a pretty solid report, exploring all the different arguments on how copyrighted works should be used in training AI models. Its conclusion:
“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. If [an AI] model can produce substantially similar outputs that directly substitute for works in the training data, it can lead to lost sales.”
It also quotes objections from companies like Universal Music Group, which is very protective of its IP holdings. “AI-generated music becomes increasingly easy to create, it saturates this already dense marketplace, competing unfairly with genuine human artistry, distorting digital platform algorithms and driving ‘cheap content oversupply.'”
In other words, AI companies can’t just ingest whatever they want for training AI models. Licensing is the way to go. Seems logical, right? Well…
Less than 24 hours after the report was available, Perlmutter was fired. Was there a connection? Suspicions are strong, and Elon Musk’s name has come up.
Rep. Joe Morelle says, “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.”
The music industry loves the idea of supporting how it because AI should and shouldn’t be used. But will the Trump administration listen?
Read more here.
