James Boyle and Pamela Jones win EFF Pioneer Awards

James Boyle and Pamela Jones have been awarded the Electronic Frontier Foundation's highest acolade and named as EFF Pioneer Award winners, 'leaders who are extending freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier.'

"James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. Professor Boyle is recognized for his exceptional scholarship on the "second enclosure movement" -- the worldwide expansion of intellectual property rights -- and its threat to the rich public domain of cultural and scientific materials that the Internet might otherwise make available. An original board member of Creative Commons and co-founder of Science Commons, Professor Boyle has worked for over 20 years as both an academic and institution builder to celebrate and protect the values of cultural and scientific openness.

When Pamela Jones created Groklaw in 2003, she envisioned a new kind of participatory journalism and distributed discovery -- a place where programmers and engineers could educate lawyers on technology relevant to legal cases of significance to the Free and Open Source community, and where technologists could learn about how the legal system works. Groklaw quickly became an essential resource for understanding such important legal debates as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the European Union antitrust case against Microsoft, and whether software should qualify for patent protection."

Congratulations to both and to the other award winners this year, Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News and Hari Krishna Prasad Vemur, a security researcher in India who revealed serious security flaws in India's paperless electronic voting machines; enduring jail time, repeated interrogations, and ongoing political harassment from a political establishment more focussed on covering up the problems than doing anything to address them.