The first comprehensive history of software patenting, Software Rights (Yale University Press, October 2019) explores how patent law made software development the powerful industry that it is today. Author Gerardo Con Díaz, assistant professor of science and technology studies, reveals how patent law has transformed the ways computing firms make, own, and profit from software.

Díaz is a historian of digital law, and he joined the STS Department in 2016. He investigates how law and policy have shaped the digital world. His first book, Software Rights, is a history of software patenting in the United States. His second is a history of Internet copyright under contract with Yale University Press.

View the book at Yale University Press