These are links to my published writings, mostly about patents or technology policy generally.

Fiction

• Stop the Music, Boing Boing, July 28, 2015. A short story envisioning a future of copyright law's endgame: memory erasure.
• How Amazon Got a Patent on White-Background Photography: Bad Laws, Not Bad Examiners, Create Obvious Patents, Ars Technica, June 10, 2014. My first work of published fiction, and to my knowledge the only work of fiction set in the halls of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Best of Nonfiction

• Ice Cream Patent Headache, Slate, Oct. 20, 2015. What the history of Eskimo Pies tells us about software patents today.
• Can Copyright Protect a Language? What a Big Software Case Could Mean for Klingon Speakers, Slate, June 3, 2015. In which I explain how the Oracle v. Google case would impact everyone, down to the last Trekkie.
• Taking a Page from the Patent Troll Playbook, Slate, December 17, 2014. A comparison of the notorious patent villains who threaten small family businesses with an esteemed professor who threatened—a small family business.
• ClearCorrect v. International Trade Commission, Federal Circuit, Oct. 16, 2014. This is the brief that turned an obscure trade agency's case about teeth into a national battle for Internet freedom.
• Down with the Patent Trolls, LA Times, p. A17, Aug. 22, 2013. A straightforward piece on why patents need to be fixed, and my first real legit publication.

Amicus Briefs

An amicus curiae brief, or amicus brief for short, is submitted to a court considering a legal case and is intended to provide perspectives different from those that the parties arguing the case are presenting.

• Lexmark v. Impression Products, Federal Circuit, June 19, 2015. The case is over whether Lexmark can assert its patent rights against companies that resell Lexmark printer cartridges that had been refilled. We argued that, if Lexmark got its way, it would destroy consumer rights in practically every product being sold today.
• McRO v. Bandai Namco, Federal Circuit, June 19, 2015. The brief itself deals with a fairly technical (but very interesting) issue of patentability of software, but it led to one of my favorite press releases.
• Kimble v. Marvel Enterprises, Supreme Court, March 4, 2015. Again, deals with a somewhat dry question of licensing of patents, but the closing page of the brief, which was repeated in the press release, rivals Justice Kagan's opinion for number of Spider-Man references.
• Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, Supreme Court, Feb. 26, 2014. In which we submit a seven-line BASIC program to the highest court in the land, to prove that a patent is a whole lot simpler than it's being made out to be.

Congressional Testimony

• H.R. ___, the Targeting Rogue and Opaqe Letters Act (TROL Act): Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, April 16, 2015.
• Examining Recent Supreme Court Cases in the Patent Arena: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet of the House Committee on the Judiciary, February 12, 2015.
• The Impact of Patent Assertion Entities on Innovation and the Economy: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, November 14, 2013.

Op-Eds and Commentary

• How You Can Use Gadgets May Hinge on a Printer Ink Case, WIRED, Oct. 2, 2015.
• Charles Duan & Shiva Stella, A Patent Case About Teeth Shouldn’t Crush an Open Internet, Slate, April 10, 2015.
• The STRONG Patents Act Is a Death Squad for Innovation, Roll Call, March 17, 2015.
• Making the Supercookie a Little Sweeter: Nine Lines of Code Could Make Verizon’s Controversial User-Tracking System a Bit Less Invasive, Slate, January 30, 2015.
• Would You Like a Patent Lawsuit with Your Meal?, Roll Call, December 18, 2014.
• Tristan Gray–Le Coz & Charles Duan, Apply It to the USPTO: Review of the Implementation of Alice v. CLS Bank in Patent Examination, Patently-O Patent Law Journal, 2014.
• A Definite Problem of Patent Law: Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments, JURIST Professional Commentary, May 7, 2014.
• Big Businesses Are Filing Frivolous Patent Lawsuits to Stifle Innovative Small Competitors, Forbes, February 24, 2014.
• Patent Trolls Are the Economy-Suffocating Exception to the ‘No Free Lunch’ Rule, Forbes, November 15, 2013.
• First Rule of Patents: Do No Harm to Consumers, The Hill, October 24, 2013.