On Friday, the US Copyright Office released a draft of a report finding that AI companies breached fair use laws while training AI. The next day, the agency's head, Shira Perlmutter, was fired — and the alarm bells are blaring. The report's findings were pretty straightforward. Basically, it says, using large language models (LLMs) trained on copyrighted data for tasks like "research and analysis" is probably fine, as "the outputs are unlikely to substitute for expressive works used in training." But that changes when copyrighted material is used for commercial applications, particularly when those applications compete in the same market as […]