President Donald Trump's administration filed an "emergency" Supreme Court plea to remove the register of copyrights at the Library of Congress, which had refused to support the plans of AI companies owned by his billionaire supporters.
In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that Trump lacked the authority to remove Shira Perlmutter because she worked for Congress, not the executive branch. Trump first tried to fire Perlmutter in May after she released a pre-publication version of the third part of the Copyright Office's report "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence," which suggested that AI companies could be infringing on copyrighted works.
"Donald Trump's termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis," Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25) said at the time of her firing. "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 pre-release of the copyright report stated that "the copying involved in AI training threatens significant potential harm to the market for or value of copyrighted works."
"Where a model can produce substantially similar outputs that directly substitute for works in the training data, it can lead to lost sales. Even where a model's outputs are not substantially similar to any specific copyrighted work, they can dilute the market for works similar to those found in its training data, including by generating material stylistically similar to those works."
Musk has suggested that all intellectual property laws should be repealed.
In September, Trump held a dinner with 33 tech industry leaders, including the CEOs of the top AI companies.
JUST IN at SCOTUS: another Trump administration emergency plea, this one to secure the removal of the Register of Copyrights by the acting Librarian of Congress (Trump fired the previous Librarian of Congress in May)
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— Steven Mazie (@stevenmazie.bsky.social) October 27, 2025 at 1:47 PM