White House calls on SCOTUS to boot top copyright official

WASHINGTON (CN) — The White House called on the Supreme Court to remove the nation’s top copyright official on Monday, marking the latest move to pull the justices into personnel shake-ups as President Donald Trump seeks to assert vast power over the government.

Trump, in his 31st emergency application, sought the removal of Shira Perlmutter, who was reinstated as the register of copyrights by a lower court. The under-the-radar position supervises copyright claims and advises Congress on copyright issues, like artificial intelligence.

Nearly half a dozen of Trump’s emergency appeals have concerned terminating government officials he sees as opposing his agenda, including independent labor and employment dispute board members, product safety and federal trade commissioners, a government watchdog and a federal reserve governor.

“This court has repeatedly recognized in recent months that the government faces a serious risk of irreparable harm when a federal court reinstates a removed executive officer,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote, referencing the administration’s prior wins. “Such an order harms the executive branch by ‘allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power’ over the president’s objection.”

Perlmutter says she was fired one day after the U.S. Copyright Office issued a report finding that some uses of copyrighted works in generative AI training could run afoul of fair use laws. Major tech companies, like OpenAI and Meta, are facing mounting litigation from actors, authors, newspaper publishers and more who say their copyrighted works have been improperly used to train the companies’ AI models.

In late May, Perlmutter filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s authority to fire her. She claimed that only the Librarian of Congress could fire a director of the U.S. Copyright Office. Before Perlmutter’s termination, Trump fired Carla Hayden, who had been serving as the Librarian of Congress.

Trump assigned the role to his former personal lawyer and current deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, adding acting Librarian of Congress to his resume.

A divided panel on the D.C. Circuit restored Perlmutter to her office, finding that the librarian and register were legislative officers — outside of Trump’s executive branch authority.

Trump called the ruling another instance of “improper judicial interference with the president’s power to remove executive officers.”

“The register, acting under the librarian’s supervision, wields executive power by exercising ‘significant regulatory authority over copyrights’ — impacting a wide array of crucial intellectual-property issues,” Sauer wrote.

Allowing a removed officer to continue exercising authority, the White House said, was a greater risk to the government than a wrongfully removed officer unable to perform their duties.

“The traditional remedy for the unlawful removal of an executive officer is back pay, not a preliminary injunction granting interim reinstatement,” Sauer wrote, quoting an opinion from Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee. “Even assuming that respondent could obtain some form of reinstatement remedy at the end of the litigation — an issue the court need not decide now — the interim relief granted here is plainly unlawful.”

The Supreme Court has ceded significant authority on executive firing decisions to Trump, despite decades of precedent to the contrary. So far, the justices have only addressed issues over executive terminations on the emergency docket, but in December, the high court will hear arguments on the merits.

However, Trump pushed the justices to add a related question to their merits docket: whether courts can return terminated officials to their posts before litigation has completed.

“Like recent disputes concerning control of other executive agencies, this case warrants this court’s review,” Sauer wrote. “Underscoring the need for this court’s intervention, the D.C. Circuit’s injunction generates uncertainty and confusion for holders of intellectual-property rights. The standoff over respondent’s office is already generating collateral litigation over the validity of copyrights, as private parties argue that the Copyright Office’s actions ‘are unauthorized, ultra vires, and void’ because respondent has been validly removed from office.”

Trump’s appeal in Perlmutter’s case adds to his unprecedented use of the Supreme Court’s emergency docket — marking his 31st application. His predecessors came nowhere near that record, filing fewer than a dozen over a 16-year period.

According to Courthouse News’ running total, Trump has won 21 emergency appeals, only receiving an adverse ruling in three cases. Two appeals were withdrawn, one was denied as moot, and four remain pending.

Attorneys representing Perlmutter did not respond to a request for comment on the application. The court ordered her to respond to Trump’s appeal by Nov. 10.

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