They Fired the Copyright Chief—Now What?
The recent firing of Shira Perlmutter, the now-former Director of the U.S. Copyright Office, didn’t just happen in a vacuum. It happened the same week her office dropped a report that had Big Tech trembling—because it told the truth. That using artists' work to train AI without permission is not “fair use.” And that companies like OpenAI, Meta, and others should be paying for what they’re feeding their machines.
In the music industry, “free” has always had a cost—usually paid by the artist. Whether it was peer-to-peer file sharing or YouTube streams monetized with pennies, we’ve watched the value of music get chipped away for decades. Now, AI is the latest hungry mouth, and it wants to gorge on decades of human creativity, all without asking or paying.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t innovation. It’s extraction. A remix with no royalties. A sample without clearance. And no, it doesn’t matter if the machine “didn’t know” what it was copying. If the source material is ours—our voices, our rhythms, our arrangements—then ownership still matters.
Perlmutter’s report challenged this wild west model of AI development, and in return, she got a pink slip. That’s not just an attack on her—it’s an attack on every artist whose name has ever been left off a dataset. Every bedroom producer whose tracks became “training material.” Every label that’s barely breaking even while Silicon Valley calls it progress.
We’ve been down this road before. When corporations take without credit, culture suffers. And if we don’t draw a line now, the next generation of artists will inherit an industry where your voice can be cloned, your melodies mimicked, your style stolen—and you’ll have no say in it.
So what can we do?
Speak up. Write to your reps. Join the artists already demanding stronger copyright protection in the age of AI. We have more power in numbers than we think.
Support platforms that respect ownership. Whether it’s licensing tools, ethical AI developers, or labels putting artists first, put your money and your music where the respect is.
Stay informed. They want this to be complicated so we tune out. Don’t. Read the fine print. Know what tools you’re using, what you’re signing, and who profits from your work.
Organize. Whether you’re a DJ, a composer, or a beatmaker—collectivize. Because the only thing scarier to tech monopolies than copyright law… is community.
At Unmixed, we believe in innovation—but not if it means stealing from the underground and selling it back to us as “the future.” Not if it means devaluing the very labor that builds music scenes from scratch.
Art is not raw data.
Artists are not unpaid interns for machine learning labs.
And ownership isn’t optional.
— Unmixed Editorial Team
