Ars Technica: In a wild time for copyright law, the US Copyright Office has no leader. “In May, Copyright Register Shira Perlmutter was abruptly fired by email by the White House’s deputy director of personnel. Perlmutter is now suing the Trump administration, alleging that her firing was invalid; the government maintains that the executive branch has the authority to dismiss her. As the […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/07/06/ars-technica-in-a-wild-time-for-copyright-law-the-us-copyright-office-has-no-leader/

Trump removes Copyright Office director, following earlier Librarian of Congress firing, raising questions on federal appointments. #USCopyrightOffice #Government #Meta

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-director-of-u-s-copyright-office-shira-perlmutter-sources/

No One Is in Charge at the US Copyright Office

https://www.wired.com/story/us-copyright-office-chaos-doge/

With the chaos at the United States Copyright Office, alarms have been raised about potential issues with its certificates.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2025/06/05/are-new-copyright-registrations-valid/

Judge Declines To Immediately Block Trump’s Effort To Fire Register Of Copyrights
#News #Politics #DonaldTrump #ElectionLine #LibraryofCongress #ShiraPerlmutter #USCopyrightOffice

https://deadline.com/2025/05/trump-register-of-copyrights-shira-perlmutter-1236412633/

European Publishers Council stays true – to the tired old trope about “copyright theft”

A few weeks ago Walled Culture explored how the leaders in the generative AI world are trying to influence the future legal norms for this field. In the face of a powerful new form of an old technology – AI itself has been around for over 50 years – those are certainly needed. Governments around the world know this too: they are grappling with the new issues that large language models […]

#adtech #advertising #artificialIntelligence #bbc #bots #contextualAdvertising #eu #euipo #europeanPublishersCouncil #factChecking #genai #generativeAi #guardian #journalism #licensing #llms #searchEngines #slogan #training #uk #usCopyrightOffice

https://walledculture.org/european-publishers-council-stays-true-to-the-tired-old-trope-about-copyright-theft/

Authors Guild Petitions to Reinstate U.S. Copyright Chief; European Creators Demand AI Transparency: Self-Publishing News with Dan Holloway

It is a week of petitions in the books world. With thanks to Porter Anderson over at Publishing Perspectives for drawing attention to this. Both of them touch on copyright. They may or may not also…
https://selfpublishingadvice.org/petitions/

#AItransparency #AuthorsGuild #copyrightpetitions #Europeancreators #USCopyrightOffice
@indieauthors

Search Engine Journal: U.S. Copyright Office Cites Legal Risk At Every Stage Of Generative AI . “The United States Copyright Office released a pre-publication version of a report on the use of copyrighted materials for training generative AI, outlining a legal and factual case that identifies copyright risks at every stage of generative AI development.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/05/15/search-engine-journal-u-s-copyright-office-cites-legal-risk-at-every-stage-of-generative-ai/

"When Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last week and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter over the weekend, it was seen as another move driven by the tech wing of the Republican Party — especially in light of the Copyright Office releasing a pre-publication report saying some kinds of generative AI training would not be considered fair use. And when two men showed up at the Copyright Office inside the Library of Congress carrying letters purporting to appoint them to acting leadership positions, the DOGE takeover appeared to be complete.

But those two men, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, were not DOGE at all, but instead approved by the MAGA wing of the Trump coalition that aims to put tech companies in check.

Perkins, now the supposed acting Register of Copyrights, is an eight-year veteran of the DOJ who served in the first Trump administration prosecuting fraud cases. Nieves, the putative acting deputy librarian, is currently at the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, having previously been a lawyer on the House Judiciary Committee, where he worked with Rep. Jim Jordan on Big Tech investigations. And Todd Blanche, the putative Acting Librarian of Congress who would be their boss, is a staunch Trump ally who represented him during his 2024 Manhattan criminal trial, and is now the Deputy Attorney General overseeing the DOJ’s side in the Google Search remedies case. As one government affairs lobbyist told The Verge, Blanche is “there to stick it to tech.”"

https://www.theverge.com/politics/666179/maga-elon-musk-sacks-copyright-office-perlmutter

"Two men claiming to be newly appointed Trump administration officials tried to enter the US Copyright Office in Washington, DC, on Monday, but left before gaining access to the building, sources tell WIRED. Their appearance comes days after the White House fired the director of the copyright office, Shira Perlmutter, who had held the job since 2020. Perlmutter was removed from her post on Saturday, one day after the agency released a report that raised concerns about the legality in certain cases of using copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence.

A source familiar with the matter tells WIRED that the two men who tried to enter the Copyright Office showed security at the building a document stating that they had been appointed by the White House to new roles within the office. The source identified the men as Brian Nieves, who claimed he was the new deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, who said he was the new acting director of the Copyright Office, as well as acting register.

After this article was published, the Department of Justice confirmed to WIRED that Nieves and Perkins had been appointed to lead the Copyright Office. Both are both currently high-ranking officials at the DOJ. The Justice Department declined to comment about whether the two officials attempted to enter the Copyright Office on Monday. The White House did not respond to a request for comment."

https://www.wired.com/story/us-copyright-office-trump-takeover/

Copyright Office head fired after reporting AI training isn’t always fair use https://arstechni.ca/DEhPM #ArtificialIntelligence #USCopyrightOffice #generativeai #DonaldTrump #copyright #chatbots #fairuse #Policy #openai #AI

Trump Fires Top Copyright Official Days After Terminating Librarian of Congress https://petapixel.com/2025/05/12/trump-fires-top-copyright-official-days-after-terminating-librarian-of-congress/ #libraryofcongress #uscopyrightoffice #presidenttrump #copyright #politics #trump #News #Law #law

US Copyright Office found AI companies breach copyright. Its boss was fired

https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/12/us_copyright_office_ai_copyright/

Things are so crazy right now that I'm not even sure if this is a good or a bad thing to happen... :-D

"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 to seemingly express support 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.

Mr. 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.

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."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-director-of-u-s-copyright-office-shira-perlmutter-sources/

Mashable: U.S. Copyright Office has registered 1,000+ works enhanced by AI. “A January 2025 report from the Office stated that hundreds of AI-enhanced works had been registered, a spokesperson for the U.S. Copyright Office told Mashable. Now, we know that more than 1,000 such works have been registered.”

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/05/06/mashable-u-s-copyright-office-has-registered-1000-works-enhanced-by-ai/

Leaders in the generative AI world are daring to say the unsayable: that copyright is not sacrosanct

For the last hundred years or so, the prevailing dogma has been that copyright is an unalloyed good, and that more of it is better. Whether that was ever true is one question, but it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era, for reasons explained at length in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). Despite that fact, recent attempts to halt the constant […]

#aiActionPlan #Amazon #china #deezer #elonMusk #exceptions #fairUse #google #jackDorsey #lobbyists #musicStreaming #openai #patents #stockImageLibraries #tdm #trademarks #US #usCopyrightOffice

https://walledculture.org/leaders-in-the-generative-ai-world-are-daring-to-say-the-unsayable-that-copyright-is-not-sacrosanct/

YouTube Apparently Unsure If Shakespeare Is In The Public Domain

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/19/youtube-apparently-unsure-if-shakespeare-is-in-the-public-domain/

This is the First-Ever AI Image to Be Granted Copyright Protection https://petapixel.com/2025/02/12/this-is-the-first-ever-ai-image-to-be-granted-copyright-protection-a-slice-of-american-cheese/ #uscopyrightoffice #copyrightoffice #generativeai #Technology #protection #copyright #aiimage #invoke #News

Copyright madness: YouTube seems to doubt whether Shakespeare is in the public domain

One of the darker threads of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is how complex copyright enforcement systems can be abused, for example by sending Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown requests for material that is perfectly legal. A recent post on the Public Citizen blog offers an extreme example of this blight. Here’s the summary of what happened:

When […]

#counternotice #dmca #google #infringement #nonProfit #publicDomain #registration #shakespeare #takedown #usCopyrightOffice #youtube

https://walledculture.org/copyright-madness-youtube-seems-to-doubt-whether-shakespeare-is-in-the-public-domain/

US Copyright Office clarifies AI-generated content rules: New report outlines copyright rules for AI-generated works, focusing on human authorship. https://ppc.land/us-copyright-office-clarifies-ai-generated-content-rules/ #Copyright #AIGeneratedContent #IntellectualProperty #CopyrightLaw #USCopyrightOffice