The Digital Plantation Architecture Contesting Data Nullius and the Extraction of Caribbean Cultural Capital in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence

This paper examines the structural conditions by which the generative artificial intelligence economy of the Global North extracts cultural and intellectual capital from the Caribbean without adequate legal, economic, or political recourse for originating communities. Repurposing the colonial legal fiction of terra nullius into a contemporary doctrine of Data Nullius, global technology entities bypass existing intellectual property frameworks to treat Caribbean cultural heritage — comprising news archives, literary works, musical expression, and syncretic cultural production — as a freely available resource for commercial AI training. Through analysis of the asymmetric operation of Fair Use and Fair Dealing regimes, the economics of data extraction, and documented harms including cultural hallucination and economic displacement, the paper demonstrates that existing legal frameworks are structurally inadequate to protect Caribbean sovereign interests in the age of generative AI. The paper introduces the concept of the Digital Plantation — a structural economic circuit in which Caribbean data is extracted, refined into AI products in the Global North, and sold back to the region of origin — and situates this within the broader phenomenon of the Extraction Paradox and the Sovereign Void. A three-pillar Sovereign Data Architecture is proposed in response, encompassing: legislative reciprocity through text and data mining reform grounded in the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (2019/790/EU) as a regional benchmark; collective data trusteeship through Sovereign Data Trusts with defined governance, corpus, and revenue-distribution mechanisms; and jurisdictional repositioning that leverages the comparative advantage of existing Caribbean intellectual property law — in particular the computer-generated works provision of the Trinidad and Tobago Copyright Act — to attract ethical AI investment. The paper concludes that sovereign governance of data is a precondition for meaningful Caribbean participation in the digital economy, and that digital transformation without such governance constitutes the acceleration of structural dependency.