“Community Discussion: Digital Colonialism & Caribbean Futures.

  POLICY BRIEF Safeguarding Caribbean Culture and Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence   Author Dr. Abiola Inniss, Ph.D., LLM Institution The Inniss Institute for Digital Policy and Intellectual Property Prepared For CARICOM Heads of Government; Ministers of ICT, Culture, Legal Affairs, and Foreign Affairs Date January 2026   1.  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY   Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming global economies, but for the Caribbean, it presents a unique and urgent risk: the extraction of cultural data, creative works, and linguistic heritage without consent, compensation, or control. Current international legal frameworks—especially U.S. “fair use” doctrine—enable AI companies to scrape Caribbean cultural content freely. This dynamic mirrors historical patterns of exploitation and positions the region as a “digital plantation...

  Inniss Institute Launches to Deliver High‑Level Digital Governance and IP Advisory Services Across the Global South The new Caribbean‑led institute supports governments, cultural institutions, and development agencies with policy design, capacity‑building, and frameworks for cultural and data asset protection. Brooklyn, NY — A new Caribbean‑led institution with a Global South mandate has officially launched. The Inniss Institute for Digital Policy and Intellectual Property will provide specialized advisory, training, and policy design services to governments, public institutions, and development partners across the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, the Pacific, and other emerging regions. Founded by Dr. Abiola Inniss , a leading scholar of Caribbean law, digital sovereignty, and intellectual property, the Institute responds to urgent concerns shared across the Global South: artificial intelligence systems built on unprotected cultural data, rapid digital transformation w...

In recent years, few scholars have reshaped the intellectual landscape of Caribbean governance and digital policy as profoundly as Dr. Abiola Inniss, whose work bridges law, political economy, and technology with unusual clarity and conceptual force. Her scholarship is not merely interdisciplinary; it is structurally integrative, weaving together historical analysis, legal doctrine, and contemporary technological critique to illuminate the deep continuities between past and present forms of extraction.  As the Architect of Caribbean Intellectual Property, Dr. Inniss has established a field where none previously existed, offering a coherent framework for understanding how intellectual property law intersects with cultural identity, economic development, and regional sovereignty. What distinguishes her work is its insistence that the Caribbean is not a peripheral case study but a site of theory.  Dr. Inniss challenges the gravitational pull of Euro American epistemic dominance...

In 1493, European powers utilized the legal fiction of terra nullius—nobody’s land—to claim sovereignty over the inhabited territories of the Caribbean. Five centuries later, a similar fiction is being constructed in the digital sphere. The "training data" that fuels the multi-billion-dollar generative AI economy is treated as data nullius: information belonging to no one, available for the taking. But this data is not neutral. It is the digitized sum of our human expression, our history, and our syncretic culture. And once again, the Caribbean is being positioned as a site of extraction. The engine driving this modern extraction is the United States doctrine of "Fair Use." While designed to balance American copyright interests, this law has metastasized into a tool of digital colonialism. Major AI laboratories in Silicon Valley scrape the open web—ingesting Caribbean news archives, literature, music, and academic repositories—claiming that this consumption is ...