Perlmutter has claimed she got on the president’s bad side with a report that suggested some copyrighted works used to train artificial intelligence models would likely require licensing — that is, tech companies would have to pay to use that material. Perlmutter’s lawsuit said that Trump “allegedly disagreed” with that report. Days later, a White House official sent an email to Perlmutter asserting that she had also been terminated.
In a 2-1 decision earlier this year, a panel of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals said that the register of copyrights is part of the legislative branch, meaning that only a Senate-confirmed Librarian of Congress can remove her, and not the president.
“The executive’s alleged blatant interference with the work of a legislative branch official, as she performs statutorily authorized duties to advise Congress, strikes us as a violation of the separation of powers that is significantly different in kind and in degree from the cases that have come before,” US Circuit Judge Florence Pan wrote.
The Trump administration told the high court in its appeal that the DC Circuit’s decision “contravenes settled precedent and misconceives the Librarian’s and Register’s legal status.” That’s partly because the register of copyrights, it argued, performs “executive functions,” such as taking part in meetings with foreign governments about copyright issues, which it described as “an increasingly sensitive issue in international diplomacy.”
“Treating the Librarian and Register as legislative officers would set much of federal copyright law on a collision course with the basic principle that Congress may not vest the power to execute the laws in itself or its officers,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court in the emergency filing.
Home
Chat
Login
Register