A bill moving through the House of Representatives would fundamentally restructure who controls the US Copyright Office, and the music industry has largely not noticed. H.R. 6028, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act, introduced in November 2025 by Representative H. Morgan Griffith (R-VA), would sever the Copyright Office from the Library of Congress, which has housed and supervised it since the 19th century, and make the Register of Copyrights a presidential nominee subject to Senate confirmation, serving a 10-year term with the option of reappointment. The bill cleared the House Administration Committee on May 14 and is reportedly on a path to fast-track passage through the suspension calendar. Music attorney Kevin Casini, a Quinnipiac University law professor who advises rightsholders and trade groups, flagged the legislation in a LinkedIn post earlier this month, warning that “the quiet restructuring of copyright governance is happening in plain sight.”
To understand why the bill matters, it helps to understand what the Copyright Office actually does and why its leadership is already in dispute. In May 2025, the Trump administration fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, one day after her office released a report concluding that training AI on copyrighted works qualifies as fair use in some circumstances but not others. The firing followed the removal of Librarian of Congress Carla D. Hayden, with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche installed as acting Librarian before moving to replace Perlmutter with a Department of Justice official. Perlmutter sued, arguing that only the Librarian of Congress, not the President, has the power to appoint or remove the Register. A federal appeals court reinstated her in September 2025, and she remains in the role while the legal battle continues. The Supreme Court deferred action on the case in December 2025 pending related disputes over presidential removal power, and the case remains unresolved. H.R. 6028 would settle the underlying constitutional question by statute, recasting the Register as a presidential appointee and effectively mooting the Perlmutter litigation. Ticketmaster
The structural changes in the bill are specific and far-reaching. Under current law, the Register answers to the Librarian of Congress, a legislative branch official. H.R. 6028 removes that supervisory relationship entirely. The Register would instead be nominated by the President after the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees jointly recommend three candidates, and confirmed by the Senate for a fixed 10-year term. The bill moves in the opposite direction for the Librarian of Congress and the Government Publishing Office director, both of which are currently presidential appointments. Under H.R. 6028, those positions would be selected by a bipartisan congressional commission and could only be removed by a majority vote of House and Senate leadership. Griffith framed the restructuring as a matter of constitutional logic: because the Copyright Office “performs executive-like functions” such as administering registrations and issuing regulations, he argued the Register should be an executive branch appointee, while the Librarian, whose role is more purely legislative, should move to congressional control.
