Authors

This book was written by James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, designed by all of its authors in innumerable, hilarious and occasionally manic conference calls, and drawn by Keith Aoki, a person who (in the opinion of his co-authors) is far too talented to be a law professor.

Keith Aoki is a longtime cartoonist who loves the late 1960s comic work of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko and earlier greats like Will Eisner, Chester Gould and Al Capp. He has also been influenced by the vibrant contemporary work of Robert Crumb, Scott McCloud, Art Spiegelman and Jamie Hernandez. In the mid-1980s, Aoki decided to leave the bohemian art demimonde to go to Harvard Law School. He is now Professor of Law at U.C. Davis King Hall School of Law, where he has taught since 2007, and specializes in the areas of intellectual property, local government law, globalization, and critical theory. Prior to U.C. Davis, he was the Philip H. Knight Professor of Law at the University of Oregon School of Law, which he joined in 1993. He has published law review articles in the Stanford, California, Iowa and Boston College Law Reviews and is author of the forthcoming book Seed Wars: Cases and Materials on Intellectual Property and Plant Genetic Resources.

James Boyle is the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and one of the founders of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He is a columnist for the online Financial Times and The Huffington Post. Boyle was the winner of the 2003 World Technology Award for Law for his work on the “intellectual ecology” of the public domain, and on the “second enclosure movement” that threatens it. His most recent book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, is available online and, among other honors, received the Donald McGannon Book Award and was named the ASIST Book of the Year for 2009. Boyle is also the author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society as well as a depressingly large number of law review articles, and is the special editor of Collected Papers on the Public Domain. He currently serves on the board of the Public Library of Science and the advisory board of Public Knowledge; was one of the original board members of Creative Commons (2002–2009, the last year as Chairman); and co-founded Science Commons and ccLearn.

Jennifer Jenkins is Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, where she heads its “Arts Project” and teaches seminars on 'Intellectual Property, the Public Domain and Free Speech' and 'Music and Copyright.' As a lawyer, she was a member of the team that defended the copyright infringement suit against the publisher of the novel “The Wind Done Gone” (a parodic rejoinder to “Gone With the Wind”). As an artist, she co-authored “Nuestra Hernandez,” a fictional documentary addressing copyright and appropriation, and has authored several short stories, one of which was published in Duke's Tobacco Road literary magazine.