With the increasing prominence of AI in all sectors of our economy and society, access to training data has become an important topic for practitioners and policy makers. In the Global North, a small number of large corporations with deep pockets have gained a head start in AI development, using training data from all over the world. But what about the creators and the communities whose creative works and languages are being used to train AI models? Shouldn’t they also derive some benefit?
And what about AI developers in Africa and the Global South, who often struggle to gain access to training data? In an effort to try to level the playing field and ensure that AI supports the public interest, legal experts and practitioners in the Global South are developing new tools and protocols which aim to tackle these questions. One approach is to come up with new licenses for datasets. In a pathbreaking initiative, lawyers at the University of Strathmore in Nairobi have teamed up with their counterparts at the University of Pretoria to develop the NOODL license. NOODL is a tiered license, building on Creative Commons, but with preferential terms for developers in Africa and the Global South. It also opens the door for recognition and a flow of benefits to creators and communities. NOODL was inspired by researchers using African language works to develop Natural Language Processing systems, for purposes such as translation and language preservation.
In this presentation, Dr Melissa Omino, the Head of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT) at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya, talks about the NOODL license.
This presentation was originally delivered at the Conference on Copyright and the Public Interest in Africa and the Global South, in Johannesburg in February 2025.