MSSE Seminar Series
The term “intellectual property” or “I.P.” embraces several distinct but related bodies of law, including patents (utility patents, plant patents, and design patents), copyrights, trademarks, and unfair competition law. Utility patent law deals with exclusive rights in inventions; copyright in works of authorship such as literature, music, and software; and trademarks in source identifiers such as brand names.

In this talk, Prof. Cotter will present an overview of three of these bodies of IP law (trade secrets, copyright, and patents), with a special emphasis on their relation to software. He will discuss, among other things, the protectability of software under these three bodies of law; how courts determine whether a competing software program infringes the copyright in another program; reverse engineering as a fair use of software; software-related issues under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; and the current controversy over the patentability of software-related innovations, including business methods that involve the use of computers. We will also discuss how courts determine who owns an invention or work of authorship.

Prof. Thomas F. Cotter is the Briggs and Morgan Professor of Law and a Solly Robins Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota Law School. Professor Cotter’s principal research and teaching interests are in the fields of domestic and international intellectual property law, antitrust, and law and economics. He is the coauthor, with Roger D. Blair, of Intellectual Property: Economic and Legal Dimensions of Rights and Remedies, published by Cambridge University Press in 2005. He has authored or coauthored other 30 other scholarly works, including articles in the California Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, the Iowa Law Review (forthcoming), the Minnesota Law Review, the University of Illinois Law Review, the William & Mary Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, the Notre Dame Law Review, and the Tulane Law Review. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Minnesota, Professor Cotter clerked for a federal judge; practiced law in New York and Chicago; and taught at the University of Florida and at Washington and Lee University.