Last weekend, President Donald Trump fired the director of the U.S. Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, and less than a day later, the office arrived with a certainty report on artificial intelligence.
The report found that AI companies training their models on copyrighted materials may not be protected by the legal doctrine of fair use. The findings of the report are consultative, but in the upcoming court cases, they may have an impact on the subject. Not only that, but on Thursday, May 8, President Trump fired Dr. Carla Hayden, director of the Library of Congress, who oversaw the U.S. Copyright Office. When fired Dr. Haydn, the White House cites the library’s DEI initiative.
However, the shooting time and abnormalities surrounding AI reports shocked some copyright lawyers. Cornell H. Winston, president of the American Legal Library Association
President Trump has pledged a business-friendly approach to artificial intelligence, and he issued two executive orders in April to promote U.S. leadership in the AI industry.
Copyright Office report is bad news for the AI industry
The U.S. Copyright Office has been studying three-part reports on the relevance of copyright law and artificial intelligence, which has a great impact on AI companies. At present, many legal aspects of AI and copyright law have not been resolved, involving the high court cases that OpenAI and Meta are currently working in court.
The third and final report, “Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3: Generated AI Training,” in some cases, deals exactly with the type of fair use arguments. Specifically, the report examines whether training AI models involve copyright-protected materials (such as books, movies, news articles, and images) is a violation of copyright law or is protected in the doctrine of fair use. (Disclosure: Mashable’s parent company Ziff Davis filed a lawsuit against Openai in April, accusing it of infringing on Ziff Davis’ copyright in training and operating its AI systems.)
Instead of waiting for the final version of the report and promoting its release, the office quietly released a “pre-release version” of the report on Friday.
The U.S. Copyright Office has registered more than 1,000 works.
The preliminary version raises doubts about the feasibility of a reasonable use of defense, and may use fraudsters like Meta and Openai in court. Part 3 of the report also says artists may suffer financial damage from AI-generated materials that mimic their working styles, and lose the licensing opportunity if AI companies can train copyrighted works without compensating creators.
Mixable light speed
About the sequence of events
Dr. Carla Hayden, a librarian at the Library’s DEI program.
Credits: Shannon Finney/Getty Images
On Thursday, the Library of Congress was fired. On Friday, the U.S. copyrighted its report Part 3; on Saturday, the head of the Copyright Office was fired.
When the report was unexpectedly published Friday afternoon, if the looming copyright holder could be cleared, Blake E., copyright attorney and associate professor of law at the University of Colorado Law School.
“The status of “before publication” is very strange and obvious in time relative to the firing of the Congressional librarian. I continued to clear (speculatively!) in the copyrighted office (speculatively!) and they felt they needed to hurry up the game.”
A few hours later, the White House opened Perlmutter.
In a statement provided to Mashable, a spokesperson for the U.S. Copyright Office provided only this brief comment: “On Saturday afternoon, May 10, 2025, the White House sent an email to Shira Perlmutter saying that your position as a copyright and director of the U.S. immediately terminated U.S. copyright.”
The office has “no further comments” on our questions about the timing of the report’s release. We contacted the White House to comment on the release of the report, shooting of Dr. Perlmutter and Hayden, and we will update this article if we receive a reply.
Reid describes the AI report as a “direct loss of AI companies” on Bluesky. Reid said in a telephone interview with Mashable that the report was published shortly after Congressional librarians gained a lot of attention.
“It’s hard for me to come up with a series of events that don’t involve the government trying to do something with AI,” Reed said. “I still don’t think we know what this is…but I just see it as Occam’s razor explanation, especially the next day’s registry was fired.”
“AI companies want the office to be able to walk around and give them some lifeline in the lawsuits they can use to support their positions,” Reed said. The report concluded, “Something certainly is beyond what we think is fair use. You know, the language they use to support it and a kind of specific theory didn’t help me if the report was to be accepted by the court.”
Although some copyright lawyers are concerned about this, suspicious timing does not necessarily prove that these incidents are directly related. A published version of Part 3 of the report is available online on the U.S. Office of Copyright Website.
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Artificial Intelligence Politics
