James Boyle (academic)


James Boyle is a Scottish intellectual property scholar. He is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina. He is most prominently known for his advocating for loosening copyright policies in the United States and worldwide.

Teaching and activism

Boyle graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1980 and subsequently studied at Harvard Law School. He joined Duke University School of Law in July 2000. He had previously taught at American University, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
In 2002, he was one of the founding board members of Creative Commons, and held the position of Chairman of the Board in 2009, after which he stepped down. He also co-founded Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data, and ccLearn, a division of Creative Commons aimed at facilitating access to open education resources.
In 2006, he earned the Duke Bar Association Distinguished Teaching Award.
The courses he teaches include "Intellectual Property", "The Constitution in Cyberspace", "Law and Literature", "Jurisprudence", and "Torts".

Written works

He is the author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and Construction of the Information Society as well as a novel published under a Creative Commons license, The Shakespeare Chronicles.
In his work on intellectual property, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, Boyle argues that the current system of copyright protections fails to fulfill the original intent of copyright: rewarding and encouraging creativity. It was also published under a non-commercial CC BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license.
Boyle also contributes a column to the Financial Times New Technology Policy Forum.
In 2011, Boyle was one of five experts consulted for the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth, a comprehensive analysis of the United Kingdom's intellectual property system that made suggestions for data-driven reform of the system.

Selected publications