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. In 2003 he 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, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, and the editor of Critical Legal Studies, Collected Papers on the Public Domain and Cultural Environmentalism @ 10 (with Larry Lessig.) His other books include Bound By Law, a co-authored comic book about the effects of intellectual property on documentary film, and The Shakespeare Chronicles, a novel. Apart from his articles at The Huffington Post he also writes a column for the Financial Times and shorter, 140 character observations as thepublicdomain on Twitter.

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 use to share their work. Boyle 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.

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