Out with the old and in with the new.
Although Labcorp v. Metabolite was dismissed last week, in this morning’s order list, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in KSR v. Teleflex (No. 04-1350, docket here). Previous commentary at Patently-O. The issue is the obviousness test used by the Federal Circuit in patent cases. This promises to be a major case.
The Supreme Court issued a decision this morning dismissing the writ of certiorari in Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings v. Metabolite Laboratories, Inc. as improvidently granted. Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Stevens and Souter, dissented from the dismissal.
Decision here. Discussion at Patently-O here.
Brett Frischmann reports at Madisonian.net that Creative Commons and Microsoft are releasing a copyright licensing tool to enable the “easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft® Office applications.” That’s great news and a big development — the ease of inserting a license should get the public thinking more about the benefits of clarity in copyright law, and encourage broader licensing of many works, such as currently occurs widely at Flickr.com.
Michael Carroll reports at Carrollogos that the plugin for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel applications is now available here. Hopefully this tool will be included as a standard part of the upcoming release of Office 2007.
As the Internet Archive shows, there is great value in preserving digital information for posterity. But sometimes, there is greater value in destroying information and doing so quickly. Information Week recounts the 2001 incident when an American spy plane was forced to land in Chinese territory after the plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet. The article notes that the U.S. crew was unable to erase the hard drives in time to protect the security of sensitive information. “Since then,” the article states, “researchers have been looking for a way to quickly erase computer hard drives to deny access to sensitive intelligence data.”
According to the article, researchers have developed an effective technique to erase hard drives in minutes rather than hours:
The researchers concluded that permanent magnets are the best solution. Other methods, including burning disks with heat-generating thermite, crushing drives in presses, chemically destroying the media or frying them with microwaves all proved susceptible to sensitive, patient, recovery efforts.
The military need for such technology is obvious and is a simple no-brainer. But additionally interesting are the potential commercial and consumer applications of such technology. According to the article, the researchers claimed the magnetic eraser could be used to quickly erase VHS tapes, floppy drives, data cassettes and hard drives. Maybe someday soon, it will be unacceptable and even illegal for corporations and government agencies to keep sensitive information — like your social security number — on easily stolen laptops, unless those machines are equipped an effective auto-erasure mechanism.