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. His most recent book is The Line: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Personhood (forthcoming MIT Press Oct. 2024) 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 for 7 years, the last year as Chairman of the Board. He was also a co-founder of Science Commons, which aimed to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data. Professor Boyle was awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Pioneer" Award for his work on digital civil liberties. He also received 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 (Harvard UP), The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale UP). He edited 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 other books include two educational graphic novels, Bound By Law, which explores copyright, fair use and documentary film and Theft: A History of Music, which offers a 2000 year history of music and musical borrowing. He recently published an open textbook on IP, Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials 6th edition (2024) -- with Jennifer Jenkins. Most of his books are freely available online under Creative Commons licenses.