The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an effort by President Donald Trump to fire a top official at the Library of Congress for now, a move that will allow her to remain in her post while her case is reviewed by lower courts in light of the court’s blockbuster decisions on presidential power earlier this week.
Background
The move means that Shira Perlmutter will remain the director of the US Copyright Office despite a long-pending request from Trump to remove her immediately. Trump launched a battle with the Library of Congress last spring, removing the former Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, in early May and then attempting to install then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of his former private attorneys, as the acting librarian.
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.
Legal Battle
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 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.”
Original reporting: KTVZ (Central Oregon) — read the source article.
