Report from the Washington Post
In Brief – President Donald Trump continued his campaign of firing executive branch officials often considered immune to being removed without cause when the White House changes partisan hands, removing the Librarian of Congress, the top official at the Library of Congress, followed soon thereafter by the Register of Copyrights, who heads the US Copyright Office, which is a part of the Library of Congress. The Copyright Office has been releasing a series of reports in recent months on copyright issues raised by the development and use of artificial intelligence, including a pre-publication report on “Generative AI Training” just days before the two senior officials were released. The top Democrat on the House Administration Committee which oversees the Library of Congress publicly alleged that the officials were removed because they refused to “to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”
Context – You don’t need AI to know that correlation does not equal causation. Legal questions around “training” neural networks of major GAI models with non-licensed copyrighted material is probably the top legal and regulatory issue surrounding AI. Or at least the one with the most lawyers and deep-pocketed companies involved. But do not expect definitive actions by the executive or legislative branches of the US Government. Major copyright lawsuits have taken center stage, and they won’t be resolved too quickly. The Copyright Office report on GAI training correctly focuses on how US judges choose to apply the fair use doctrine to the activity. It’s a complex legal question and both sides have strong arguments. But in terms of the two firings, the claim that they were retribution because the report took a strong stand against the AI developers is just wrong. Publishers criticized the report for being too weak protecting copyright holders. In the EU, with its AI Act, regulators and AI expert groups will play key roles setting training rules. Even in big markets like the UK and Japan, governments are cautiously deliberating while they wait for legal developments in the US to come into more focus.