The Principle of Data Reversion : An Inalienable Reversionary Interest in Sovereign and Cultural Data

This paper states and defends the Principle of Data Reversion (the “Inniss Data Reversion” principle): the proposition that the extraction, scraping, or digitisation of a people’s data and cultural memory transfers, at most, a defeasible and conditional interest — never absolute title — and that a reversionary interest in that data and the value derived from it remains vested in the originating sovereign or community, exercisable notwithstanding any agreement, licence, or technical act of capture to the contrary. Where the Inniss Data Nullius framework names the legal fiction by which Global South data is treated as ownerless, and the Digital Plantation describes the structural architecture of extraction, the Principle of Data Reversion supplies the corrective doctrine. Reversion reframes extraction as a terminable grant rather than an acquisition. Integrating the inalienability logic of statutory copyright reversion under 17 U.S.C. § 203, the common-law concept of the reversionary interest, contractual data-return practice, and the normative architecture of Indigenous Data Sovereignty, the paper specifies the elements of the principle — its subject matter, the reversionary holder, the triggering events, its inalienability, the persons against whom it is enforceable, and what survives reversion — and sets out mechanisms for its effectuation in CARICOM and the wider Global South.