President
“On Saturday afternoon, May 10, 2025, the White House sent an email to Shira Perlmutter saying ‘your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately,’” an office spokesperson said in the statement.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Perlmutter couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Perlmutter was appointed to the post in 2020 by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, whom Trump fired May 8, according to an internal Library of Congress e-mail. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said May 9 that Hayden “did not fit the needs of the American people.”
Perlmutter’s firing came a day after her office issued a pre-publication report on copyright issues related to generative artificial intelligence training. The office called for the growth of voluntary licensing regimes for copyrighted works, saying it is “premature” for the government to get involved.
“When a model is deployed for purposes such as analysis or research—the types of uses that are critical to international competitiveness—the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training,” the office said in its report. “But 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.”
Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, decried Perlmutter’s firing in a statement.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” Morelle said Saturday. “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.”
