James Boyle

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Professor Boyle was one of the original Board Members of  Creative Commons, which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work.  He served as a board member from 2002 until 2009, the last year as Chairman of the Board. He was also a co-founder of Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data, and of ccLearn which works to promote the development and use of open educational resources. He serves on the board of the Public Library of Science and on the advisory board of Public Knowledge.   In 2003 Professor Boyle won the World Technology Network Award for Law for his work on the public domain and the “second enclosure movement” that threatens it.   He is the author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society, and the editor of Critical Legal Studies, Collected Papers on the Public Domain and Cultural Environmentalism @ 10 (with Larry Lessig.)   He has also written a distressing number of articles on intellectual property, internet regulation and legal theory both for scholarly journals and the popular press. His more recent books include Bound By Law, a co-authored “graphic novel” about the effects of intellectual property on documentary film,  The Shakespeare Chronicles, a novel, and the book to which this site is devoted, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.  He writes a regular online column for the Financial Times’ New Economy Policy Forum.