Professor Hollaar retired in May 2014 after 34 years as a faculty member in the School of Computing (formerly the Department of Computer Science). He came to Utah in 1980 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he had received his Ph.D. in 1975 and was then on the faculty.
He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1969, and has completed two years of law school at the University of Utah's College of Law.
While an active faculty member, Professor Hollaar's research included software and hardware systems for text handling and retrieval (major support from the National Science Foundation and the Central Intelligence Agency), distributed systems, and data communications. He was the first Director of Campus Networking at the University of Utah and was involved in the planning of CSnet, the NSF project that led to NSFnet. He created and taught the computer networking course at Utah, as well as courses in hardware and software design and development, database systems, and operating systems.
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.
More recently, he taught courses in intellectual property and computer law. He is the author of "Legal Protection of Digital Information," published in 2002 by BNA Books and available on the Internet at no cost. He is now working on turning the material into a self-paced online course.
His current papers on computer and intellectual property law are available here.
In retirement, Professor Hollaar is active as a consultant or expert in a variety of computer-related court cases, as well as a Special Master assisting judges in software discovery, determination of copyright infringement, and the construction of patent claims. He is also indulging his interest in the technical side of theater as a volunteer stage electrician at Pioneer Theatre. He is an advisory board member for the University of Utah's public radio station, KUER.
Last updated: 11-10-2014School of Computing • 50 S. Central Campus Dr. Rm. 3190 • Salt Lake City, UT 84112
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