Trump strikes a blow for AI – by firing the US copyright supremo; The Guardian, May 13, 2025

 Blake Montgomery , The Guardian; Trump strikes a blow for AI – by firing the US copyright supremo

"Over the weekend, Donald Trump fired the head of the US copyright office, CBS News reported. Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, was sacked after she issued a report questioning AI companies’ growing need for more data and casting doubt on their expressed need to circumvent current copyright laws.

In a statement, New York Democratic representative Joe Morelle pointed specifically to Trump’s booster-in-chief Elon Musk as a motivator for Perlmutter’s firing: “Donald Trump’s termination of register of copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”

Trump’s abrupt severing of the copyright chief from her job reminds me of the Gordian knot. Legend has it that Alexander the Great was presented with a knot in a rope tying a cart to a stake. So complex were its twistings that no man had been able to untie it of the hundreds who had tried. Alexander silently drew his sword and sliced the knot in two. The story is one of a great man demonstrating the ingenuity that would lead him to conquer the world. Alexander did solve the riddle. He also defeated its purpose. The cart is left with no anchor. Perhaps the riddle had taken on more significance than the original problem of keeping the cart in place, but that is a question for another day.

Trump may have cut through any thorny legal questions the copyright office had raised, but the vacuum at the head of the US’s copyright authority means that richer and better-connected players will run roughshod over copyright law in the course of their business. That may be what the president wants. The more powerful players in lawsuits over AI and copyright are undoubtedly the well capitalized AI companies, as much as I want artists to be paid in abundance for their creativity. These tech companies have cozied up to Trump in an effort to ensure a friendlier regulatory environment, which seems to be working if the firing of the copyright chief is any evidence. Lawsuits over how much AI companies owe artists and publishers for their surreptitious use of copyrighted material with an avowed lack of permission still abound, and both plaintiffs and defendants will be taking their cues from the US copyright office."

Trump fires top US copyright official; Politico, May 10, 2025

KATHERINE TULLY-MCMANUS , Politico; Trump fires top US copyright official

[Kip Currier: If the allegation below is correct -- that Musk or anyone could gain and/or be granted access to the copyrighted works that federal copyright filers are required to provide for deposit to the U.S. Copyright Office (i.e. the U.S. federal government), as a condition of receiving a federal copyright, and that Musk or anyone could then use these federally-deposited copyrighted works to train proprietary AI models without permission or payment to the owners of those federally-deposited copyrighted works -- this is a matter that must be reported on more widely and investigated by the U.S. Congress.]

[Excerpt]

"Rep. Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee which oversees the Library of Congress and U.S. Copyright Office, is alleging it is “no coincidence [Trump] acted less than a day after [Perlmutter] refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models.”

Perlmutter and her office issued a lengthy report about artificial intelligence that included some questions and concerns about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology, an industry which Musk is heavily involved in.

“This action once again tramples on Congress’s Article One authority and throws a trillion-dollar industry into chaos,” Morelle continued in a statement. “When will my Republican colleagues decide enough is enough?”"

Jack Dorsey Says Intellectual Property Law Shouldn't Exist, and Elon Musk Agrees: 'Delete All IP Law'; Entrepreneur, April 14, 2025

SHERIN SHIBU EDITED BY MELISSA MALAMUT  , Entrepreneur; Jack Dorsey Says Intellectual Property Law Shouldn't Exist, and Elon Musk Agrees: 'Delete All IP Law'

"While Dorsey may want to end intellectual property law, copyright holders are still holding on to their work. Dozens of cases have been filed over the past few years in U.S. federal court against AI companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, as authors, artists, and news organizations accuse these companies of using their copyrighted work to train AI models without credit or compensation.

AI needs ample training material to keep it sharp. It took about 300 billion words to train ChatGPT, an AI chatbot now used by over 500 million people weekly. AI image generator DALL·E 2 needed "hundreds of millions of captioned images from the internet" to become operational."

Why Musk and Dorsey want to ‘delete all IP law’; The Washington Post, April 15, 2025

Analysis by Gerrit De Vynck

 and 

Will Oremus

with research by 

Andrea Jiménez

 , The Washington Post; Why Musk and Dorsey want to ‘delete all IP law’

"Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and CEO of Square, posted a cryptic and drastic demand on Elon Musk’s X over the weekend: “delete all IP law.” The post drew a quick reply from Mr. X himself: “I agree.”

Musk’s laconic response amplified Dorsey’s post to his 220 million followers and sparked a debate that drew in a cast of characters including Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, tech lawyer and former vice presidential candidate Nicole Shanahan, novelist Walter Kirn, evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller and the technologist and early Twitter developer Evan Henshaw-Plath, a.k.a. Rabble, among others...

Serious policy idea or not, the concord between Dorsey and Musk highlights how the debate over AI and copyright law is coming to a head in Silicon Valley.

How it’s resolved will have major ramifications for the tech companies, creative people and their livelihoods and the overall AI race."

Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’; The Guardian, January 9, 2025

Dan Milmo, The Guardian; Elon Musk says all human data for AI training ‘exhausted’

"However, Musk also warned that AI models’ habit of generating “hallucinations” – a term for inaccurate or nonsensical output – was a danger for the synthetic data process.

He said in the livestreamed interview with Mark Penn, the chair of the advertising group Stagwell, that hallucinations had made the process of using artificial material “challenging” because “how do you know if it … hallucinated the answer or it’s a real answer”.

Andrew Duncan, the director of foundational AI at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute, said Musk’s comment tallied with a recent academic paper estimating that publicly available data for AI models could run out as soon as 2026. He added that over-reliance on synthetic data risked “model collapse”, a term referring to the outputs of models deteriorating in quality...

High-quality data, and control over it, is one of the legal battlegrounds in the AI boom. OpenAI admitted last year it would be impossible to create tools such as ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, while the creative industries and publishers are demanding compensation for use of their output in the model training process."

‘Blade Runner 2049’ Producers Sue Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery, Alleging Copyright Infringement; Variety, October 21, 2024

Todd Spangler , Variety; ‘Blade Runner 2049’ Producers Sue Elon Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery, Alleging Copyright Infringement

"Alcon Entertainment, the production company behind “Blade Runner 2049,” sued Tesla and CEO Elon Musk, as well as Warner Bros. Discovery, alleging that AI-generated images depicting scenes from the film used for the launch of Tesla’s self-driving Robotaxi represent copyright infringement.

In its lawsuit, filed Monday in L.A., Alcon said it had adamantly insisted that “Blade Runner 2049,” which stars Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, have no affiliation of any kind with “Tesla, X, Musk or any Musk-owned company,” given “Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech.”"

Why Do People Like Elon Musk Love Donald Trump? It’s Not Just About Money.; The New York Times, September 25, 2024

  Chris Hughes, The New York Times; Why Do People Like Elon Musk Love Donald Trump? It’s Not Just About Money.

"Mr. Trump appeals to some Silicon Valley elites because they identify with the man. To them, he is a fellow victim of the state, unjustly persecuted for his bold ideas. Practically, he is also the shield they need to escape accountability. Mr. Trump may threaten democratic norms and spread disinformation; he could even set off a recession, but he won’t challenge their ability to build the technology they like, no matter the social cost...

As much as they want to influence Mr. Trump’s policies, they also want to strike back at the Biden-Harris administration, which they believe has unfairly targeted their industry.

More than any other administration in the internet era, President Biden and Ms. Harris have pushed tech companies toward serving the public interest...

Last year, Mr. Andreessen, whose venture capital firm is heavily invested in crypto, wrote a widely discussed “manifesto” claiming that enemy voices of “bureaucracy, vetocracy, gerontocracy” are opposed to the “pursuit of technology, abundance and life.” In a barely concealed critique of the Biden-Harris administration, he argued that those who believe in carefully assessing the impact of new technologies before adopting them are “deeply immoral.”

Controversial California AI regulation bill finds unlikely ally in Elon Musk; The Mercury News, August 28, 2024

 RYAN MACASERO , The Mercury News; Controversial California AI regulation bill finds unlikely ally in Elon Musk

"With a make-or-break deadline just days away, a polarizing bill to regulate the fast-growing artificial intelligence industry from progressive state Sen. Scott Wiener has gained support from an unlikely source.

Elon Musk, the Donald Trump-supporting, often regulation-averse Tesla CEO and X owner, this week said he thinks “California should probably pass” the proposal, which would regulatethe development and deployment of advanced AI models, specifically large-scale AI products costing at least $100 million to build.

The surprising endorsement from a man who also owns an AI company comes as other political heavyweights typically much more aligned with Wiener’s views, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, join major tech companies in urging Sacramento to put on the brakes." 

Elon Musk called copyright a ‘plague on humanity’ and now he’s being sued for $250 million by music publishers who claim Twitter stole their content; Forbes, June 15, 2023

 RACHEL SHIN, Forbes; Elon Musk called copyright a ‘plague on humanity’ and now he’s being sued for $250 million by music publishers who claim Twitter stole their content

"A group of music companies is suing Twitter for over $250 million, claiming the platform has ignored many copyright violation notices. The coalition is composed of 17 music publishers, including such big names as Sony Music Publishing, Universal Music Corp., and Big Machine Music. One problem for Elon Musk in defending the lawsuit is that he’s said he considers copyright a “plague on humanity.”"

Farting unicorn row: artist reaches settlement with Elon Musk; The Guardian, July 21, 2018

Damien Gayle, The Guardian; Farting unicorn row: artist reaches settlement with Elon Musk

"A Colorado artist says he has reached a settlement with Elon Musk after challenging the Tesla tycoon’s use of a farting unicorn motif that he had drawn as an ironic tribute to electric cars.

Musk used the cartoon image on Twitter, without attribution, to promote his Tesla electric car range, and ignored Tom Edwards’ attempts to come to a licensing arrangement, telling the artist’s daughter it would be “kinda lame” to sue."

Elon Musk drawn into farting unicorn dispute with potter; The Guardian, June 27, 2018

Sam Levin, The Guardian; Elon Musk drawn into farting unicorn dispute with potter 

[Kip Currier: Given the facts as presented in this article (and knowing that the U.S. only recognizes "moral rights" vis-a-vis the very narrow Visual Artists Right Act [VARA]), is there anyone who still doesn't think that at the very least the "decent" thing to do would have been for Elon Musk/Tesla to provide attribution (let alone some kind of compensation) when repeatedly using Tom Edwards' image? Imagine if the situation were reversed and someone was using Elon Musk's "original expressions" without attribution.]

"Edwards said he wanted to speak out in part because he often hears similar stories from artists. “I realize my farting unicorn is not as serious as whistleblowers,” he said, “but honestly, it’s all about integrity.”

He added: “I’d really like to get on Elon Musk’s good side … He’s really really interesting. But he isn’t above copyright law.""

Elon Musk quits AI ethics research group; BBC, February 22, 2018

BBC; Elon Musk quits AI ethics research group

"Technology billionaire Elon Musk has quit the board of the research group he co-founded to look into the ethics of artificial intelligence.

In a blog post, OpenAI said the decision had been taken to avoid any conflict of interest as Mr Musk's electric car company, Tesla, became "more focused on AI".

He has been one of AI's most vocal critics, stressing the potential harms."