Appeals court blocks Trump's firing of Copyright Office director

A divided panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled 2–1 that President Trump lacked the authority to unilaterally remove Shira Perlmutter as Register of Copyrights, temporarily blocking her firing and allowing her to continue serving while the underlying case proceeded. The majority held that the office sits within the Library of Congress, a legislative-branch agency, and that removing its head is not a power the Constitution gives the president to exercise alone — a separation-of-powers argument rather than a ruling on the merits of any copyright policy.

Trump had purported to fire Perlmutter on 10 May 2025, one day after her office issued a pre-publication report addressing whether training generative AI models on copyrighted works without a licence could qualify as fair use — a report that stopped short of a blanket conclusion but was read by rights holders and AI developers alike as leaning against the industry’s broadest fair-use arguments. The timing led Perlmutter’s lawyers, and outside observers, to link the dismissal to the report’s contents, though the administration did not offer that as its stated justification and the court’s ruling turned on procedure rather than motive.

The decision was preliminary and covered only Perlmutter’s continued service pending fuller litigation; it did not resolve the underlying question of who has authority to appoint or remove the Register of Copyrights. It mattered to the AI record because the Copyright Office sits at the centre of the fair-use disputes running through the era’s copyright litigation, and a change of leadership there — whatever the administration’s actual reasons — would have altered who oversees the government’s official position on the question dozens of lawsuits against AI companies were simultaneously litigating in court.