Awards
- Excellence in Teaching Award, 2025.
- Pauline Ruyle Moore Scholar Award, for On the Appeal of Drug Patent Challenges, 2025.
- Best Publication of 2023 on Antitrust and Intellectual Property, Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award, for Mandatory Infringement, 2024.
Articles
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What Is Copyrightable in Software?, 94 George Washington Law Review 638 (2026) ssrn
- Solving a fifty-year-old software copyright law puzzle, by delving into the world of register variables and list comprehensions.
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Defining the Character in Copyright Law, 79 Stanford Law Review (forthcoming 2027)
- With Rachel Bamberger
- Despite giving characters special protection, copyright law has not figured out what characters are. Can literary theory help?
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Certainly Uncertain: An Analysis of the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act of 2023, 13 American University Business Law Review 743 (2025) ssrn
- A new patent reform bill, intended to crumble two centuries of jurisprudence, is not as well-reasoned as its proponents claim it to be.
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Examining Patent Eligibility, 97 St. John’s Law Review 47 (2023) ssrn
- A little-studied 2011 Federal Circuit decision had major ripple effects on patent eligibility and examination practice, in ways that challenge dominant policy narratives about the doctrine.
- Media coverage: ELSIhub
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Content Moderation on End-to-End Encrypted Systems: A Legal Analysis, 8 Georgetown Law Technology Review 1 (2024) ssrn
- With James Grimmelmann
- Computer scientists have come up with cutting-edge technologies for content moderation on end-to-end encrypted platforms. Are those technologies legal?
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On the Appeal of Drug Patent Challenges, 72 American University Law Review 1177 (2023) ssrn
- Empirically, inter partes review patent challenges have been accurate and effective at lowering drug prices. But the Federal Circuit’s publication practices hide those facts.
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Mandatory Infringement, 75 Florida Law Review 219 (2023) ssrn
- Exploring the unexpected effects of intellectual property/regulation overlaps on market power, innovation incentives, and intellectual property theory.
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Pharmaceutical Patent Two-Step: The Adverse Advent of Amarin v. Hikma Type Litigation, 12 New York University Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law 1 (2022)
- With S. Sean Tu
- Buried within a tangled web of patents surrounding a widely used cardiovascular drug are the seeds of a legal strategy that could delay generics for years to come.
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A Tale of Two Interoperabilities; Or, How Google v. Oracle Could Become Social Media Legislation, 2021 Cardozo Law Review de•novo 246 (2021)
- How the Supreme Court’s decision on software interface copyrights unexpectedly affects a contemporary debate over social media platform competition.
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Hacking Antitrust: Competition Policy and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 19 Colorado Technology Law Journal 313 (2021)
- How broad interpretations of the federal computer trespass law conflict with competition policy based on real-world examples and intellectual property theory.
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Gene Patents, Drug Prices, and Scientific Research: Unexpected Effects of Recently Proposed Patent Eligibility Legislation, 24 Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review 139 (2021)
- What lessons historical debates over scientific research and human gene patents carry for current legislative proposals to amend patent subject matter eligibility.
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Who’s Afraid of Section 1498? A Case for Government Patent Use in Pandemics and Other National Crises, 22 Yale Journal of Law and Technology 1 (2020)
- With Christopher Morten
- How the government patent use statute ought to play a key role in addressing national crises like COVID-19, in view of history and legal theory.
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Copyright in the Texts of the Law: Historical Perspectives, 9 New York University Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law 191 (2020)
- Why the unexplored history of official promulgations of law informs the current debate over copyrightability of state codes of law.
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Of Monopolies and Monocultures: The Intersection of Patents and National Security, 36 Santa Clara High Technology Law Journal 369 (2020)
- How the interaction between patents and national security is more complex than recent political dialogues have made it out to be.
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Internet of Infringing Things: The Effect of Computer Interface Copyrights on Technology Standards, 45 Rutgers Computer and Technology Law Journal 1 (2019)
- How technical interoperability standards like WiFi and HTML reveal an unresolved danger of copyright protection in software interfaces.
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Internet Freedom with Teeth, 67 Florida Law Review Forum 243 (2016)
- How legal scholarship and policy advocacy came together to stop the U.S. International Trade Commission from expanding its jurisdiction to Internet data flows.
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Apply It to the USPTO: Review of the Implementation of Alice v. CLS Bank in Patent Examination, 2014 Patently-O Patent Law Journal 1 (2014)
- How the USPTO reacted in the immediate wake of the Alice v. CLS Bank decision, based on empirical data of its examination outcome changes.
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Alternative Software Protection in View of In re Bilski, 7 Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 332 (2009)
- With Lauren Katzenellenbogen & James Skelley
Book Chapters
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What Patents Can Learn From Orphan Drugs (forthcoming 2027)
- In Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Health
- The Orphan Drug Act seems similar to patents in some ways, but it contains a few interesting innovations that patent law could adopt.
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Inside the AI (Sept. 2025)
- In Symposium on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence
- What is inside an AI model? There are two answers, and copyright law might be choosing the wrong one.
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If Not Patents, Then Trade Secrets? (forthcoming 2026)
- In Research Handbook on Trade Secrecy in Data and Data Infrastructure
- A seemingly self-evident trope of patent policy logic is not as simple as it seems.
- Toward a Legal Framework for Patient Access to At-Home Health Care Device Data (2024) ssrn
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Patent Title Insurance (2024)
- In Handbook of Intellectual Property Rights and Innovation
- Homeowners buy title insurance, in case they turn out not to be the true owner of their houses. Should patent owners also get insurance, in case they aren’t the first to invent their ideas?
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A Failure to Interoperate: The Lost Mars Climate Orbiter (2022)
- In “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World
- A failed NASA mission’s lessons for modern information and Internet technology.
Books and White Papers
- Stephen Clowney et al., Frameworks of Property Law (Charles Duan ed., 2026)
- The Barons and the Mob: Essays on Centralized Platforms and Decentralized Crowds (Charles Duan & James Grimmelmann eds., 2024) ssrn
- The U.S. International Trade Commission: An Empirical Study of Section 337 Investigations (R Street Institute, Policy Study No. 246, Nov. 2021)
- Product Hopping: Federal and State Approaches (R Street Institute, Policy Study No. 227, Mar. 2021)
- Biologics Patent Litigation: Reforms for Lowering Drug Prices (R Street Institute, Policy Study No. 220, Feb. 2021)
- U.S. Patents and Competitiveness with China (R Street Institute, Short Study No. 67, Feb. 2019)
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The International Trade Commission’s Authority in Domestic Patent Disputes (R Street Institute, Policy Study No. 147, June 2018)
- With Bill Watson
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Telemedicine: Lessons for—and from—Emerging Technology Policy (R Street Institute, Policy Study No. 139, Apr. 2018)
- With Joe Kane & Caleb Watney
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Policy Approaches to the Encryption Debate (R Street Institute, Policy Study No. 133, Mar. 2018)
- With Arthur Rizer, Zach Graves & Mike Godwin
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Protecting Privacy, Promoting Competition: A Framework for Updating the Federal Communications Commission Privacy Rules for the Digital World (Public Knowledge, 2016)
- With Harold Feld, John Gasparini, Tennyson Holloway & Meredith Rose
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A World on NDN: Affordances & Implications of the Named Data Networking Future Internet Architecture (Named Data Networking, Technical Report No. NDN-0018, 2014)
- With Katie Shilton, Jeff Burke, kc claffy & Lixia Zhang
- A Five Part Plan for Patent Reform (Public Knowledge, 2014)
Law Blogs
- USPTO Seeks Public Input on Patents and the Right to Research, InfoJustice, July 10, 2024
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Who’s Afraid of Section 1498?: Government Patent Use as Versatile Policy Tool, Written Description, Apr. 24, 2020
- With Christopher Morten
- Do Patents Protect National Security?, Lawfare, July 12, 2019
- A Patent Dispute Tests the Administration’s National Security Resolve, Lawfare, Dec. 6, 2018
- Copyright Law Could Stop 3-D Printed Guns. Should It?, Lawfare, Aug. 31, 2018
- A New Framework for the Encryption Debate, Lawfare, Apr. 9, 2018
- Questions Congress Should Ask Mark Zuckerberg, Lawfare, Apr. 5, 2018
- Are Patents Monopolies? It Depends on the Relevant Century, Patently-O, Oct. 18, 2017
- A Definite Problem of Patent Law: Nautilus v. Biosig Instruments, JURIST Professional Commentary, May 7, 2014
- The Real Results of Stock-Touting Spam, gtnews, Oct. 23, 2006
Essays
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The Importance of Being Equivalent, 17 American University Intellectual Property Brief 109 (2026)
- When recent patent cases create a legal avenue for blocking house-brand Rice Krispies, something has gone wrong.
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Infringing Patents, but Not by Choice, ABA Landslide, Sept.-Oct. 2025, at 7 ssrn
- A farmer’s herbicide blows onto the neighbors’ fields, forcing them to buy patented resistant seeds lest their crops die. Business as usual, or a threat to the foundations of patent law?
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Securing Patent Law, 11 Belmont Law Review 91 (2023) ssrn
- The conversation on intellectual property and national security needs to focus more on technological competitor nations’ potential use of U.S. patents as an offense strategy.
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Patents and the Common Good, 64 New Atlantis 75 (2021)
- Why Bayh-Dole march-in rights continue to be important to the balance of the patent system.
- The Internet Will Not Be Lowercased, Medium: Public Knowledge, June 2, 2016
Last updated: Fri, 30 Oct 2026 15:23:01 -0400