About Me

I research how law and policy have shaped the digital world. My latest book, coming out with Yale in 2025, examines how copyright law shaped the online world. My first book, Software Rights, examines the relationships between patent law and computer programming. I've also published a textbook on the history of computing with some friends, and a few works on intellectual property in the music and oil industries. I have ongoing projects in computer privacy and security, the American legal system, and the social studies of health.

My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I have also been a fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy.

I am an Associate Professor (tenured) of Science and Technology Studies at the University of California, Davis, and a former Editor in Chief of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. With Jeff Yost, I edit the Johns Hopkins Series S tudies in Computing and Culture. I received a Ph.D. from Yale University and additional degrees from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College) and Harvard University.

I grew up in Costa Rica and have been a singer since 2002, trained in classical music and contemporary musical theater. I live in Sacramento with my husband and our two dogs.

Software Rights:
How Patent Law Transformed Software Development in America

**Winner of the 2020 Computer History Museum Prize, for best book on the history of computing.**

A new perspective on United States software development, seen through the patent battles that shaped our technological landscape.

This first comprehensive history of software patenting explores how patent law made software development the powerful industry that it is today. Historian Gerardo Con Díaz reveals how patent law has transformed the ways computing firms make, own, and profit from software. He shows that securing patent protection for computer programs has been a central concern among computer developers since the 1950s and traces how patents and copyrights became inseparable from software development in the Internet age.

Software patents, he argues, facilitated the emergence of software as a product and a technology, enabled firms to challenge each other’s place in the computing industry, and expanded the range of creations for which American intellectual property law provides protection. Powerful market forces, aggressive litigation strategies, and new cultures of computing usage and development transformed software into one of the most controversial technologies ever to encounter the American patent system.

Available through Amazon, Yale, or your favorite independent bookseller.