Bruce Davis

Bruce L. Davis (born 1952) is an American businessman, most recently CEO and chairman of Digimarc. Formerly the head of both Imagic and Activision.

Early life and education A native of New York, Davis earned a B.S. in accounting and psychology and an M.A. in criminal justice from University at Albany, SUNY, and a J.D. degree from Columbia University. Davis completed a PhD in criminal justice in April 2024. His dissertation, entitled "Indecent Exposure and the Court as Custos Morum," is a seminal work on the courts as custodians of morals in America. The dissertation was honored with the University at Albany Distinguished Dissertation Award for 2024.

Career Davis began his professional career by establishing the intellectual property practice at the firm of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in San Francisco, California. He assumed leadership of Imagic as it was going out of business in the video game crash of 1983.

From 1987 to 1991, Davis was first chief operating officer, then chairman and CEO of Activision. The board of directors promoted him from senior vice president to replace Jim Levy shortly after the acquisition of Infocom, in the hopes of stemming the continuing financial damage from the crash. Activision co-founder and programmer David Crane was also critical of Davis: "Bruce Davis' biggest mistake was treating video games as commodities, rather than creative products." Nevertheless, Davis's leadership of Activision began well. He led the company to a profit in his first year at the helm on strong sales growth, following 16 consecutive quarters of multimillion-dollar losses. The turnaround effort was stymied after a huge damages award for infringement of Magnavox's original home video game patents was upheld on appeal in 1988. That year Activision changed its name to Mediagenic, as Davis sought to expand the company's product lines to non-gaming software. Kotick and his team then filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy in cooperation with Magnavox parent company Philips in a leveraged recapitalization of Activision, as it was renamed in 1992. Kotick replaced Davis in this restructuring. In April 2021, Davis retired from his role as chairman and CEO of Digimarc.

Davis has been awarded more than 100 patents on television user interface and media management and security. In 2003, Davis was named Ernst & Young's Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur Of The Year for the technology category.