Office Hours blog

LabCorp v. Metabolite dismissed

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.

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Microsoft and Creative Commons

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 […]

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This posting will self-destruct in five seconds

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. […]

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Chinese censorship and the infoglut

Yesterday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about his experiments in testing Chinese censorship of the internet. (See In China It’s ******* vs. Netizens, June 20, 2006, subscription required.) Kristof started two Chinese-language blogs and filled them with politically charged postings. He was surprised that the posts were quickly available online, with only an […]

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