Artificial intelligence models are mining the collective cognitive heritage of the human species, and a new framework suggests they should pay a global dividend for it.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
Beyond the Commons Toward a Digital Common Heritage of Mankind Framework Algorithmic Enclosure of the Cognitive Commons and the Nagoya Analogy
SSRN · 6642584
The Takeaway
Copyright law is the standard battlefield for AI training disputes, focusing on whether individual poems or images were stolen. This framework treats the entire pool of human knowledge as a global resource similar to the deep sea or the moon. Just as the Nagoya Protocol requires companies to share profits from genetic resources found in nature, AI companies would have to compensate humanity for using its shared history. Training data is not just a collection of files, it is the intellectual heritage of our species. This shift moves the conversation from individual lawsuits to a global system of benefit sharing for everyone.
From the abstract
The training of large generative models on the accumulated cultural, linguistic and intellectual output of humanity has been analysed, in the dominant Anglo-American and European legal debates, principally through the lens of copyright doctrine-fair use, transformative use, text and data mining exceptions. This article argues that copyright is the wrong instrument, operating at the wrong scale, for a structural transformation that exceeds it. What is occurring is not a succession of infringement