For years, AI firms and content companies have engaged in a wary dance — and sometimes a low-grade war — over who controls that content. Now the battleground has shifted to a more obscure Washington office — with potentially major consequences for the film, television and music industries.
The fight concerns Shira Perlmutter, the veteran lawyer and head of the U.S. Copyright Office, whose abrupt dismissal by President Donald Trump this past weekend seemed to mark a major blow for Big Tech against content rightsholders. But for all the understandable worry, the saga is hardly simple, nor is it over: on Tuesday Trump’s replacements for Perlmutter were revealed, and they may not be nearly as aligned with Big Tech as that industry would have hoped.
The drama began Friday, when Perlmutter and the copyright office released the prepublication of a report that weighed in on the contentious matter of whether AI companies can use thousands of copyrighted works such as news articles, films, TV shows and songs to train their text and video models. That issue is at the center of multiple lawsuits, as rightsholders like record labels and media companies argue that material is being taken without their consent — then fed to a model whose outputs compete with their own products.
Much of the office’s 108-page report was couched in careful legal language. “The public interest requires striking an effective balance, allowing technological innovation to flourish while maintaining a thriving creative community,” it said. But Perlmutter and her team also pushed back on tech companies’ arguments that they should be allowed access to train models on unlicensed content under a fair-use exception, essentially pushing back on the purported loophole on which they base much of their operations.
“Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with [content owners] in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” it said.
The report sparked joy in artist advocates. Ed Newton-Rex — an expert in the AI music space who left a job at Stability AI in 2023 over the company’s fair use argument for training its models — tells The Hollywood Reporter that it “backs up what lots of people in the music industry have been saying for a long time … This report is very clear that AI companies cannot assume that all generative AI training is fair use.”
Trump’s firing of Perlmutter — which the White House has yet to comment on or give its justification for — thus removed a key bulwark for content companies. While the copyright office has no legislative power, Congress and the courts can take their cues from it (“courts often cite [the Copyright Office’s] expertise as persuasive,” Blake Reid, a professor at the University of Colorado law school, had noted on Bluesky in commenting on the report).
“The concern that this represents a reprioritization of creators and content developers is very real,” music and copyright attorney Lisa Alter, founding partner at Alter, Kendrick and Baron, tells THR.
Across music and film, principals expressed their worry. A music policy leader who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter told THR that the firing is “very concerning. We’re in an existential panic, we’re trying to figure out what any of this means, is this open season and it’s a fair-use free-for-all?” Adding to the worry: Elon Musk has gone on record in recent months opposing the very idea of intellectual-property copyright, which is the mechanism by which all major content creators protect their work and all major content companies make money.
Reid Southen, a concept artist and illustrator for some of Hollywood’s biggest film franchises and an outspoken critic of AI companies, said he saw in the Perlmutter firing a worrying sign of Big Tech’s encroachment. “This report was so important, and the second it happens this administration goes into a complete backlash,” Southen said in an interview. “It’s unsurprising but extremely frustrating.
“If tech companies can pillage and plunder people’s creative work so they can make money for themselves and their friends then it will destroy whole creative industries,” he added.
The American Federation of Musicians released a statement saying that Perlmutter’s “unlawful firing will gravely harm the entire copyright community. She understood what we all know to be true: human creativity and authorship are the foundation of copyright law — and for that, it appears, she lost her job.” Neither corporate trade groups like the MPA or RIAA nor other guilds, including SAG-AFTRA and the WGA, have yet to weigh in on the dismissal.
There’s also a sense of unease, as some activists warn that the Perlmutter firing could have an emboldening effect on tech companies eager to gobble up existing data. It could prompt the tech companies to negotiate more aggressively, they say — and reduce the leverage of media companies and other content owners. A longtime follower of the tech space who asked not to be identified because they were not authorized by their company to speak to the press said Monday that AI firms could take the Perlmutter firing as a “flashing green light” in their bid to scoop up content.
But Tuesday brought a twist of sorts. The Verge revealed that the two people who’ve been charged with taking over the copyright office are Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, who are hardly friends of Big Tech and AI companies. Perkins is a former DOJ official who prosecuted fraud cases under Trump during his first term while Nieves once worked as a lawyer for the House Judiciary Committee and its chairman Jim Jordan, the Ohio Republican who has aggressively gone after Big Tech.
And Todd Blanche, who has been hired to replace Perlmutter’s boss Carla Hayden as Librarian of Congress (also just axed by Trump), is helping lead the Justice Department’s case against Google over the company’s dominance in search. Far from a victory for Big Tech, the Perlmutter firing may be a triumph for hardcore MAGA Republicans, who have shown signs of taking a more skeptical posture on AI companies’ land-grabbing.
Regardless of where the Trump appointees land on the AI debate, Perlmutter’s ouster “suggests an unprecedented break from the decades-long non-partisan nature of the copyright office,” Alter says, that could carry broader concerns for artists and content creators.
“Shira Perlmutter was a consummate intellectual property scholar, that’s what she did,” the lawyer notes. “And if the Library of Congress and copyright office are controlled by a rightwing political viewpoint instead, who says copyright protections wouldn’t be denied from material that’s not deemed to be appropriate by the current administration?”
In the meantime artist advocates hope the courts pick up the slack, at least on the AI front. In one closely watched suit, The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI and its backer Microsoft for copyright infringement. The complaint notes many cases of near-verbatim repetition of its journalists’ copyrighted work in the company’s ChatGPT outputs and calls the Sam Altman firm “a multi-billion-dollar for-profit business built in large part on the unlicensed exploitation of copyrighted works.” OpenAI has maintained that training their models on existing copyright content is protected under fair use.
A federal judge this spring allowed the core claim to go forward, and the ultimate outcome of the case could determine whether the training of large language models can continue at breakneck speed.
And in music, the major record labels are suing AI music-generation platforms Suno and Udio, alleging the companies train their models on massive infringements of unlicensed music.
While News Corp, Dotdash Meredith and the Associated Press have been among those media companies signing deals with OpenAI, obviating the question, many have not, while the likes of Ziff Davis, The Intercept and the publisher of The New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune have themselves filed suits against the firm.
Record labels have shown themselves willing to dip their toes into AI music with targeted plays involving individual artists, as shown last year through YouTube’s AI experiment Dream Track, which featured UMG and WMG artists like Charli xcx, Demi Lovato and John Legend.
For their part, while their content can appear in video-based Generative AI tools, film studios have generally tried to stay out of the fray. Studios’ position on AI copyright is complicated: they’re wary of anyone ripping off their content but may also want to use the AI tools themselves as a way to streamline production, and thus could be interested in seeing training speedbumps like creator permissions removed.
Some studios have been quietly working with Runway AI, OpenAI and other tech firms to test out these models. Last month Harmony Korine’s firm signed a first-look deal with Runway AI, and some larger studios are believed to be in more informal arrangements with the firm.
Not every film company has been as enthused, however. GKIDS, Studio Ghibli’s U.S. distributor, responded negatively when a new OpenAI tool let users easily replicate the animation studio’s signature style. The company’s distribution vice-president Chance Huskey dryly noted that “In a time when technology tries to replicate humanity, we are thrilled that audiences value a theatrical experience that respects and celebrates Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli’s masterpiece in all its cinematic hand-drawn glory.”
Late Tuesday Southen sounded an optimistic note about the appointment of Perkins and Nieves, while Newton-Rex has urged caution generally against assuming Trump, who alternately has shown allegiance both to Big Tech and a more MAGA populist base, has a clear position on the topic of AI and rightholders.
Newton-Rex says that he hasn’t given up hope on the White House pushing back against Big Tech grabbing data without consent. “We don’t know what the Trump administration thinks about these issues yet,” he said.