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David R. Koepsell is the Executive Director of the Council for Secular Humanism. He earned his PhD in Philosophy as well as his Law degree from the University of Buffalo where he studied with Barry Smith. He has authored numerous articles as well as authored and edited several books, including Searle on the Institutions of Social Reality , co-edited with Laurence Moss, (Oxford UK: Blackwell 2003), Reboot World, (New York: Writer's Club Press 2003) (fiction), and The Ontology of Cyberspace: Law, Philosophy, and the Future of Intellectual Property (Chicago: Open Court 2000) which has been translated into Japanese and Portuguese. He has lectured world-wide on issues ranging from civil rights, philosophy, science, ontology, intellectual property theory, society, and religion. Koepsell has practiced law, worked for BowStreet as an ontologist in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and taught at SUNY Buffalo, where he has an appointment as a Research Assistant Professor. He is an associate editor of Free Inquiry magazine.

In stark contrast to the work of Michael Heim, who has promoted a neo-platonic dualism in his discussions of cyberspace and virtual reality, Koepsell has argued for a Searlean realism about all expression. Cyberspatial entities are expressions of the same type as any other intentionally produced, man-made object. Koepsell's work uses legal ontology and common sense ontology to examine social objects. In the process, Koepsell criticises the distinction between patentable and copyrightable objects as artificial, and argues for an open source approach to all intellectual property. Koepsell's research interests focus on the nexus of ethics, law, and science. Specifically, while at Yale as a Visiting Fellow (2006-2007), he is researching and writing on the ethical questions involved in the practice of bio-prospecting and patenting elements of the human genome. His project is entitled “Individual and Collective Rights in Genomic Data.”

• Lin, Rita, The Ontology of Cyberspace: Law, Philosophy, and the Future of Intellectual Property, review in The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology Vol. 14, No. 1 (2000)
• Finnerty, Thomas V. "The Ontology of Cyberspace" review, Journal of High Technology Law (2003) https://www.law.suffolk.edu/highlights/stuorgs/jhtl/book_reviews/2003_2004/finnerty.pdf
• Floridi, Luciano, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information (Blackwell, 2003) p. 165
• George P. Fletcher and Steve Sheppard, American law in a Global Context (Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 394
• Open Source Culture syllabus: http://nothing.omweb.org/modules/wakka/OpenSourceCultureSyllabus/show?time=2004-09-09+03%3A20%3A10
• Morin, Arthur, "The Ontology of Cyberspace" book review, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies" (2002) http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=148&BookID=128

• Official website