Lee A. Hollaar is a Professor Emeritus in the School of Computing (formerly the Department of Computer Science) at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He taught a variety of software and hardware courses, including computer networking, operating systems, and intellectual property and computer law.

He is the author of a treatise on the legal protection of digital information,  available to the public at no cost on the Internet, as well as published by BNA Books, which includes overviews of patent and copyright law, in-depth discussions of software copyrights, copyright of digital material in a networked world, and patents for software-based inventions. Copies of his papers related to computer and intellectual property law are available here.

Professor Hollaar was on sabbatical leave in Washington, DC, during the 1996-97 academic year, as a Committee Fellow in the intellectual property unit of the Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate, where he worked on patent reform legislation, database protection, and what eventually became the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He was also a visiting scholar with Circuit Judge Randall R. Rader at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

He played a major role in adding two words to the vocabulary of intellectual property law:

He has been a special master, technical expert, or consultant in a number of copyright, patent, and trade secret cases.  He was the plaintiffs'  technical expert in the antitrust suits Caldera v. Microsoft and Bristol v. Microsoft (both of which settled in favor of the plaintiffs), and was the technical advisor to the States during the Microsoft settlement negotiations and the remedies phase of the trial. He was a policy wonk on technology and intellectual property for the Dole presidential campaign, and is the computer guru to the Capitol Steps.

He received his BS degree in electrical engineering in 1969 from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and his PhD in computer science in 1975 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Hollaar was on the faculty of the University of Illinois prior to joining the faculty of the University of Utah in 1980.

Professor Hollaar was one of the drafters of the Utah Digital Signature Act, which made Utah the first government in the world to recognize digital signatures as equivalent to handwritten ones. On November 19, 1997, as part of Utah's Digital Signature Day, Professor Hollaar executed the first legally-recognized digitally-signed will in the world.

He has conducted research on hardware and software tradeoffs in system design, particularly as they apply to systems handling large text databases. He is the co-inventor of a new method of rapidly searching text stored on a disk, and was the primary architect for perhaps the first distributed, workstation-based information retrieval system. His past research has also included work on avionics and navigation systems. He was Director of Campus Networking during the development of the University's campus-wide data communications network.

Dr. Hollaar is a senior member of the IEEE, and served as chair its Intellectual Property Committee. He is also a member of ACM, and was the vice-chair of the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval. Dr. Hollaar is a Registered Patent Agent with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and was a founding member of the National Association of Patent Practitioners.



Last updated August 1, 2014
Comments to hollaar@cs.utah.edu