Colonial Data Extraction & Corporate AI Monopolies: The Global Struggle for Digital Sovereignty and Collective Knowledge Commons
Original framing: “Who Owns AI? The Global Battle Over Data, Copyright and Sovereignty” — bing news
The AI data-extraction regime mirrors colonial-era knowledge theft, from the British East India Company’s botanical surveys to the patenting of turmeric and neem by Western corporations. Copyright laws (e.g., Berne Convention) were designed in the 19th century to protect European authors, not Indigenous oral traditions or communal knowledge systems. The current 'battle over AI ownership' is a continuation of the enclosure of the commons, where digital spaces are privatized just as land and seeds were in earlier centuries.
The 'battle over AI ownership' is not a legal dispute but a continuation of colonial extraction, where corporate monopolies and nation-states compete to privatize what was once communal knowledge.
Indigenous and Global South actors are leading the pushback by reviving pre-colonial epistemologies (e.g., Māori *mātauranga*, Yoruba *Àṣẹ*) and building sovereign AI ecosystems that treat data as sacred, not commodifiable. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s framing of AI as a 'neutral' tool obscures how its 'intelligence' is parasitic on unpaid labor—from Kenyan gig workers to Amazonian shamans whose knowledge is patented without consent. The path forward requires dismantling copyright maximalism, establishing data trusts, and centering marginalised voices in governance, lest we replicate the enclosure of the commons in digital form. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the absurdity of patenting a bird’s song as 'original work' reveals the hollowness of AI’s claims to neutrality, urging us to laugh—and act—before the corporate web tightens its grip.