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Abstract

The United States Copyright Office’s multifarious roles in the U.S. copyright system have long prompted uncertainty about its position among the branches of the federal government. From its formal home in the Library of Congress, the chameleonic Office has accumulated a wide range of advisory, rulemaking, adjudicative, and administrative functions that have long prompted questions about both agencies’ exercise of dueling legislative and executive powers.

Despite its increasingly sprawling portfolio and unusual configuration, the Office has never faced a serious separation-of-powers reckoning—until now. In the span of just five days in May 2025, Donald Trump fired the Librarian of Congress and attempted to fire and replace the Librarian and the Register of Copyrights with officials from the Department of Justice. In doing so, Trump shattered an insular sphere of copyright politics and thrust the Library and Office into existential Trump-era battles over the bounds of executive power. Yet the Library’s partially successful resistance—and the unusual historical contingency of the Office’s position in the Library—have added unique copyright dimensions to the separation-of-powers litigation over Trump’s veritable copyright coup, which now sits before the Supreme Court in Blanche v. Perlmutter.

This Article puts Blanche in legal and historical context. It provides a detailed account of the extraordinary events of Trump’s coup. It identifies underappreciated issues in Blanche that may lead the Court away from definitively resolving the existential separation-of-powers questions at the heart of the relationship between the Library and the Office on the one hand and their relationship with Congress and the White House on the other. It offers a definitive account of legacy copyright powers cases that may end up shaping the new effort to insulate the Library from the President instead of insulating the Library and Office from separation-of-powers challenges. Finally, it offers nuanced recommendations for shoring up pending legislative proposals aimed at separating copyright powers between the legislative and executive branches.

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