Law Matters

v1.1 13 FEBRUARY 2025 An exploration of how the commons have been shaped, diminished and developed, over time… bearing in mind that the contours of the commons will determine the legitimacy of the unauthorised use of content as training data for AI The Earth was given to the world of men in common, John Locke asserted in his 1689 Second Treatise on government, echoing Psalms 115:16. He noted that ‘no body has originally a private Dominion, exclusive of the rest of Mankind’ but also recognised that the development of a mechanism to appropriate the gifts of God, the world and that which lay in it, was necessary ‘before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular Man’. Writing several hundred years after the commons and the proprietary began to confront each other, Locke's world was fast moving towards one in which the proprietary was the norm, and not the commons. The proprietary was not the anti-commons; it was the commons which had become the anti- proprietary. ...

Although (non-)payments for the use of copyrighted works to train AI have taken centrestage, perhaps that's a concern which can be subsumed within the larger issues of balancing often competing interests and addressing asymmetries of power which abound in the field, issues which we would do well to engage with sooner rather than later… For some time now, it has been in vogue to say, repeatedly and resolutely, that all creators should be remunerated for the use of their content to train generative AI. This is likely largely because companies have been known to indiscriminately scrape any and all content they manage to access, protected or not, to train artificial intelligence models, occasionally, if reports are to be believed, entering into multi-million dollar deals to access and use some copyrighted content in cases where the content in question is owned by or is in the possession of powerful corporations. A report released in January 2025 by a sub-committee constituted by the M...

GenAI is here to stay as one of the tools at the disposal of students in academic institutions regardless of what one feels or thinks about it. It brings with it the obvious problem of completely making up what it presents as facts to the undiscerning as well as more subtle harms such as possibly depriving students of the opportunity to hone their own drafting skills. While imagining fantasy rather than dealing in fact is, for most practical purposes, anathema in academic settings, helping students to edit their own original essays and the like is not a clear and unequivocal harm since such a function could, for example, support those whose first language is not English and who do not have the benefit of being able to access a human being both able and willing to help them polish their work; given the strength of many classes, the teaching staff at most educational institutions would be immensely overworked if they were to spend vast amounts of time enhancing not just the substance but...

The current version of this post with footnotes in PDF is available here: [ GoogleDocs ] WORKING DRAFT v1, August 2023 Anomalies and Ambiguities A Reading of India’s 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Law NANDITA SAIKIA Contents Introduction 1. Digital Personal Data 2. Data Principals 3. Data Processing and Data Breaches 4. The Location of Processing 5. Those who Process Personal Data 6. Permissible Processing at Will 7. Managing Consent for Processing 8. Withdrawing Consent for Processing 9. Individuals Requesting Their Data 10. DPDPA Exemptions Appendix: DPDPA Povisions re The Data Protection Board re Penalties (Annotated Chapter) Introduction [Note: This document has been shared only for the purpose of academic discussion. It is not legal advice and should not be relied upon for any purpose. It has not been proofed, and it may not be accurate or complete.] The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, (referred to as the 'DPDPA...