Director

Jennifer Jenkins is Clinical Professor of Law at Duke Law School. She writes the Center’s annual Public Domain Day website and has been widely quoted on intellectual property and the public domain in outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, LA Times, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Planet Money, CBS News, CNN, the BBC, and NPR’s Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and Marketplace. She is the co-author (with James Boyle) of Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (5th ed, 2021), Theft! A History of Music (CSPD 2017), and Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law? (CSPD 2006). Her articles include In Ambiguous Battle: The Promise (and Pathos) of Public Domain Day and Last Sale? Libraries' Rights in the Digital Age. Her upcoming publications include a book on Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). While in practice, she was a member of the team that defended the copyright infringement suit against the publisher of the novel The Wind Done Gone in SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin. She also co-authored, filmed, and edited “Nuestra Hernandez,” a video demonstrating how appropriation can affect culture.

Faculty Co-Directors

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He is the author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale Univ. Press 2008); the book received the 2008 McGannon Award and was named the 2009 Book of the Year by the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Boyle is also the author of Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and Construction of the Information Society (Harvard Univ. Press 1996) and the special editor of Collected Papers on the Public Domain (Duke: L&CP 2003). His latest book is The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood (forthcoming from MIT Press). He is the co-author (with Jennifer Jenkins) of Intellectual Property: Cases and Materials (5th ed, 2021), Theft! A History of Music (CSPD 2017), a graphic novel about musical borrowing, and Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law? (CSPD 2006), a graphic novel on fair use in documentary film. Boyle received the 2003 World Technology Award for Law for his work on the "intellectual ecology" of the public domain and on the new "enclosure movement" that seems to threaten it, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation's 2010 Pioneer Award for his work "to celebrate and protect the values of cultural and scientific openness." He was a founding Board Member of Creative Commons, and has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, Newsweek and many other newspapers and magazines.

Arti Rai is Elvin R. Latty Professor of Law at Duke Law School and the Faculty Director of The Center for Innovation Policy at Duke Law, and is an internationally recognized expert in patent law, innovation policy, administrative law, and health law. From March to December 2021, Rai served as Senior Advisor on innovation law and policy issues to the Department of Commerce’s Office of General Counsel and she served as Administrator, Office of External Affairs, at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 2009–2010. She also regularly advises other federal and state agencies as well as Congress on these issues and is a member of multiple distinguished councils. She writes extensively in her fields of interest and her numerous publications have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and law reviews, including Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, the Journal of Legal Studies, Nature Biotechnology, and the Journal of Law and the Biosciences. Her research has been funded by NIH, NSF, Arnold Ventures, the Kauffman Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

Research Assistant

Sean Dudley is the Center’s research assistant. His love for the public domain is wide and vast, but with a particular interest in the history of animation and less commercially viable works. He is an active contributor to sites run by the Wikimedia Foundation under the username SDudley, and his publications include “Steamboat Willie” and the Importance of the Public Domain in Cartoon Research. His research, images, and videos are featured on the Center’s 2024 Public Domain Day website. Sean graduated from the University of Virginia.