The debate on copyright law is getting really interesting, as we’ve been anticipating for years, and exploding since the burst of the latest round in the development of artificial intelligence. The last few days have been quite dramatic in the US intellectual property space:

On May 8, 2025: Donald Trump abruptly fired Carla Hayden, the 14th Librarian of Congress since September 14, 2016. The Librarian of Congress appoints and oversees the Register of Copyrights of the U.S. Copyright Office and has broad responsibilities around copyright, extending to electronic resources and fair use provisions outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

On May 10 2025, The Copyright Office made a highly unusual “pre-publication” release of its third and last copyright and AI report.

On May 15, 2025, Trump fired also (as anticipated) U.S. Copyright Office Chief Shira Perlmutter, top copyright official since October 2020. Her tenure at the Copyright Office had been marked by efforts to modernize copyright registration and address emerging issues in digital media and technology

What’s happening here?

The Report On Copyright and Artificial Intelligence from the US Copyright Office is based on a policy study which began in August 2023, receiving over 10,000 comments from the public in response (usual procedure), with some hoping to convince the Copyright Office to guarantee more protections for artists as AI technologies advance and the line between human- and AI-created works seems to increasingly blur.

The first part of the report came in July 2024 on AI Digital Replicas and the second in January 2025 on Copyrightability. The US Copyright Office declared no laws need to be clarified when it comes to protecting authorship rights of humans producing AI-assisted works:

As early as 1965, developments in computer technology began to raise “difficult questions of authorship,” including whether material created using technology is “‘written’ by computers” or authored by human creators.

Questions of copyrightability and AI can be resolved pursuant to existing law,
without the need for legislative change.

However, the most anticipated and potentially controversial part of this report was the third one on Generative AI Training, addressing the question: Is it fair use to use copyrighted works for training an AI model, and particularly, is it fair use to use that model in a generative AI system?

The consensus is that the report generally favors rightsholders, and takes a stance that is negative for commercial generative AI applications, concluding:

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.

And here is the twist:

Finally, we note that other parts of the U.S. government are also engaged on these important issues. In addition to ongoing activities in the courts and Congress, the White House is developing an AI Action Plan to advance America’s AI leadership and has received public comments, including on the subject of intellectual property

On January 23, 2025, Trump issued an executive order on “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,” which announced the development of an Artificial Intelligence Action Plan to be published within 180 days (next July).

On February 25, 2025, the White House invited Public Comment on its AI Action Plan:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Trump’s recent Artificial Intelligence (AI) Executive Order shows that this Administration is dedicated to America’s global leadership in AI technology innovation. This Order directed the development of an AI Action Plan to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance. Today, the American people are encouraged to share their policy ideas for the AI Action Plan by responding to a Request for Information (RFI), available on the Federal Register’s website through March 15.

On March 13, 2025, OpenAI shared its Proposals for the U.S. AI Action Plan, building on its Economic Blueprint to strengthen America’s AI leadership, in the hope that Trump’s AI Action Plan will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use, and paving the way for AI companies’ unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race:

America’s robust, balanced intellectual property system has long been key to our global leadership on innovation. We propose a copyright strategy that would extend the system’s role into the Intelligence Age by protecting the rights and interests of content creators while also protecting America’s AI leadership and national security. The federal government can both secure Americans’ freedom to learn from AI, and avoid forfeiting our AI lead to the [People’s Republic of China] by preserving American AI models’ ability to learn from copyrighted material.

In its own Comments on the U.S. AI Action Plan, Google joined OpenAI in pushing feds to codify AI training as fair use. Google also insists on the rethoric of “balanced” copyright rules:

Balanced copyright rules, such as fair use and text-and-data mining exceptions, have been critical to enabling AI systems to learn from prior knowledge and publicly available data, unlocking scientific and social advances. These exceptions allow for the use of copyrighted, publicly available material for AI training without significantly impacting rightsholders and avoid often highly unpredictable, imbalanced, and lengthy negotiations with data holders during model development or scientific experimentation. Balanced copyright laws that ensure access to publicly available scientific papers, for example, are essential for accelerating AI in science, particularly for applications that sift through scientific literature for insights or new hypotheses.

The dismissals of Hayden and Perlmutter raise plenty of questions:

• Are they legal?
• Who will replace them?
• Will further changes be made on the US Copyright Office report?
• What will the courts do with this report?
• What are the implications for authors? And multinationals?

Very much in line with his other (multiple) actions and plans, Trump seems to be introducing chaos… Whether chaos is the right way to address the debate is very much in doubt. However, what’s clear is that a more than ever required debate cannot keep rotting (like many others, by the way) in inaction.

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 a question with an endless academic debate, but I agree with Glyn Moody (and many others, for sure) that it is certainly not the case since we entered the digital era.

If good artists copy (Picasso digit), what are digital artists supposed to do?

The battle for a different image of the future (of copyright) is open.

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Featured Image: I have used Leonardo with the precise prompt the Copyright Office used to determine that prompting alone isn’t authorship… inspired (or provoked) by Ars Technica 😉