Dr Catherine Cotter

Professional Support Lawyer, Slaughter and May

Catherine is a PSL in the IPIT Team at Slaughter and May, where she teaches, writes and advises on a broad range of issues including trade marks, domain names, copyright, designs, patents and confidential information. She holds a DPhil in copyright law from the University of Oxford. She previously wrote as Cat-the-Kat on the IPKat blog.

Contributed to

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With employees largely working from home in 2020 and 2021 and outside of traditional office working hours, what does this blurring of home and work life mean for the ownership of ‘creative’ works? In these circumstances, how can tech and media companies protect their interests in their employment contracts?

Q&As

Other work

New Nominet initiatives to combat use of .uk domain names for criminal activities

TMT analysis: As some tech companies will unfortunately be aware, dealing with cyber criminals who register domains names similar to their brands for fraudulent activities can be time consuming, costly and involve reputation crisis management. However, it is also costly and cumbersome to attempt to register every variation or misspelling of a brand as a domain name to guard against such potential criminal activities. Tech companies will therefore welcome the initiatives recently announced by Nominet (the registrar for the .uk domain) that aim to tackle the ongoing threat of cyber criminals who use public and private sector names to lure internet users to their site or to open malicious links via phishing activities.

Why is ICANN retiring some top-level domains?

TMT analysis: Dr Catherine Cotter, a professional support lawyer at Slaughter and May, looks at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s proposals for retiring country code top-level domains, summarising key areas of the proposal and providing background on why it has come about.