Digital Independence or Digital Submission mohd sufiyan ahmad

Digital Independence or Digital Submission? A human rights framework for AI-generated IPR in the Global South.

Abstract

The swift advancement of Generative AI in creative and knowledge economies has revealed an underlying fault line in intellectual property law, namely the human authorship doctrine. As Global North jurisdictions are engaged in discussions pertaining to the ownership of AGWs, developing countries are facing a more serious crisis of systematic extraction of their digital and cultural data. This paper claims that the legal vacuum is not pro-public domain. Rather, it opens the doors for another form of algorithmic colonialism affecting digital sovereignty and global equality.

Employing a critical legal studies approach and comparative examination of the EU AI Act, the U.S. Copyright Office decisions (most notably in Thaler v. Perlmutter (2023)), and the evolving law emerging from India, this paper finds evidence of three harms: (1) the erasure of traditional knowledge contained in AI training datasets; (2) the asymmetry of power between multinational AI companies and local creators; and (3) the lack of human rights safeguards concerning automated content generation. The proposed Sovereign AI Licensing Model emerges from Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (right to cultural participation) as well as the Nagoya Protocol on genetic resources.

The main finding is that demanding “human authorship” for IP protection is neither technologically necessary nor ethically sustainable. This paper proposes a new framework for attributing shares that utilizes compulsory licensing, which would allow AI outputs utilizing Global South data to generate a share of the profits and attribution. This structure directly relates to the seminar’s sub-themes of global governance, trade and access to knowledge. The conclusion proposes a draft model provision for inclusion in national IP law, placing digital sovereignty not as exclusion, but equitable participation in the AI economy.

Keywords Artificial Intelligence, Digital Sovereignty, Intellectual Property, Human Rights, Algorithmic Colonialism