Caribbean and Americas Intellectual Property Organization

New Working Paper | Inniss Data Nullius in the Caribbean Context: A Response to the Jamaican Rejoinder.

A serious critique deserves a serious response.

This is it.

The Jamaican rejoinder raises five objections. My conclusion after careful review: each proceeds, in significant part, from a misreading of what this framework argues, claims, and is designed to do.

Four things the Inniss Data Nullius does not do — and one thing it does:

✗ Conflict with Jamaica's constitution.
Individual privacy rights and structural data rights operate on different planes. They are not rivals.

✗ Ignore the Data Protection Act 2020.
A law on the books is not a gap closed. Community-level data appropriation sits outside that Act's reach. The gap is empirical, not hypothetical.

✗ Import terra nullius from Australia.
Terra nullius — the colonial fiction that land is ownerless and therefore claimable — is not unique to Australia. The same logic of treating resources as legally empty to justify appropriation operates in the Caribbean context. This framework applies that logic to data.

✗ Propose collectivisation.
Data Reversion is restitution. The difference is not rhetorical — it is constitutional.

✓ It stands.

The rejoinder has demanded precision, and this paper is stronger for it. Scholarly disagreement is how frameworks are tested and fields advance.

Disagree? Make the argument. That conversation is exactly what Caribbean data governance needs.

📄 Read the full paper:
SSRN: https://lnkd.in/eNpy668Z
DOI: https://lnkd.in/eXvTghtm

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