US Copyright Office leaders will headline the AIMP publishing summit on June 9

The two people who run the US Copyright Office will take the stage at a music publishing event next week, and the timing is loaded. The Association of Independent Music Publishers (AIMP) has booked Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter and General Counsel Emily L. Chapuis for a fireside chat at its 2026 Global Music Publishing Summit.

The session runs Tuesday, June 9, at the McNally Amphitheatre at Fordham University at Lincoln Center in New York City. Art Levy, VP of Business and Legal Affairs at Songtradr, will moderate.

Why these two names matter right now

Perlmutter has served as Register of Copyrights since 2020, advising Congress and federal agencies on copyright law. Chapuis, appointed General Counsel in late 2025, helped lead the Office’s multi-part report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence.

That report is the reason this booking reads as more than a panel. The Office questioned the claim that training AI on copyrighted work is fair use. Soon after it landed, the Trump administration fired Perlmutter. She sued, and a divided three-judge panel ruled in September that she was entitled to keep the job.

The stakes for AI music

Fair use is the whole ballgame in the current AI cases. It sits at the center of the Suno and Udio lawsuits and the music publishers’ fight with Anthropic.

The Office does not decide those cases. It does shape the policy and the legal reading that judges, lawmakers, and licensing teams lean on.

For publishers and working musicians, the practical question is simple. If training on copyrighted catalogs is not fair use, every AI music company has to license or rebuild. That outcome would reset the floor under recent policy moves and proposed disclosure bills alike.