Unpacking Copyright Office's AI Report Amid Admin Shakeups

James (Jim) P. Flynn and Gregory J. Krabacher, Members of the Firm in the Litigation & Business Disputes and Health Care & Life Sciences practices, respectively, co-authored an article in Law360, titled “Unpacking Copyright Office's AI Report Amid Admin Shakeups.” (Read the full version – subscription required.)

Following is an excerpt (see below to download the full version in PDF format):

When this happens within our federal government, we call it “interesting times.”

Not unlike other areas of the United States federal government of late, the U.S. Copyright Office has been thrown into turmoil following a stunning sequence of events this past week.  As reported in multiple news outlets:

• On Thursday, May 8, 2025, President Donald Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, the first woman and the first African American to be librarian of Congress.The Library of Congress is the larger federal agency within which the U.S. Copyright Office resides.
• On Friday, May 9, 2025, the U.S. Copyright Office released a “Pre-Publication Version” of the third and final part of its three-part Report on Artificial Intelligence.This Part 3 of the Report is entitled “Generative AI Training” and makes the case for finding copyright infringement where copyrighted works are used without permission to train generative AI models (more on this below). The Report was posted to the Copyright and AI landing page of the Copyright Office’s website a day after the firing of the Librarian of Congress and roughly 5 months after the official Publication of Part 2, which is about a month shorter than the interval between Parts 1 and 2 of the Report.
• On Saturday afternoon, May 10, 2025, the Registrar of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, received an email from the White House informing her that her job as Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office had been “terminated effective immediately.”
• These recent events follow earlier criticism by prominent leaders of technology companies regarding perceived constraints posed by U.S. intellectual property laws on the development of artificial intelligence products and services. For example, on April 13, 2025, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of the companies formally known as Twitter and Square, posted: “delete all IP law,” to which Elon Musk replied, “I agree.” More broadly, as lobbying in favor of regulatory relief has increased with the change of administration, the mood in Washington appears to have shifted from caution to pro-development of the AI industry, as shown by the current President’s repeal of his predecessor’s sweeping executive order and the more recent attempt by Congressional Republicans to insert into the tax and spending bill a moratorium on state AI legislation.

Given all of this, interested parties may be left to wonder whether and to what extent they should rely upon the guidance and analysis of the Copyright Office’s AI Report. The question is particularly acute for parties involved in active litigation concerning the question of copyright infringement for generative AI training.