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Online Testing Patented
An anonymous reader writes "For those who think that online testing is an obvious idea, please be advised that the USPTO recently issued U.S. Patent No. 6,513,042 for online testing to two Ohio inventors. According to an article in NEOhio CrainTech, "As of last week, Test Central Inc. in Cleveland owns the U.S. patent to conduct testing via the Internet and, in essence, owns the online testing business.""
*runs and patents slashdot trolling before it's too late*
The wise follow a damned path, for to know is to be forsaken.
It will be interesting to see what this does for Colleges and Universities, at the university I attended they were pushing for 50% of all classes to be offered online by 2010. This included quizzes and tests.
g
I'd like to patent online cheating. Licenses will come dear.
... this sounds as bright as the one-click purchase patent. Can't these people just compete on quality of service?
I used to wonder if my professors could be replaced by a VCR, perhaps even year to year with material that hasn't changed. But at some point the learning experience must be compromised, however great the financial savings.
Regardless
Avoid USA jurisdiction regarding servers, clients and networks, and you're done. oo Either if you do bussiness with it, or just do it (online testing) for fun, no one can prevent you from testing online outside that country. oo
Read between the lines while parsing.
I test shitty web sites every stinking day using IE.
Blarf.
In claim 1:
If there is no money involved you do not violate this patent. If you pay for a course and take a test as part of that course there are other ways around itIn claim 13:
There must be at least two parties making money of the testing. The first being the test maker and the second being the person who owns testing computer. If you make your own tests and host the tests on your own computer, you do not infringe.There are also claims about creating and filing tests. It appears that if you were to choose a category for your test and then create the test in that category you would not infringe. (As opposed to creating the test, putting it in a temporary folder, and then moving it to the proper place as covered by the patent.)
Although I am skilled in the art, I am no patent lawyer. The patent system says that only a patent lawyer, and not somebody skilled in the art can say what a patent is about, so run this by your patent lawyer before making tests online.
Good thing they forgot to add a Cowboy Neal option to their tests.
I would say any prior art in this area is about as old as the net.
We complete the site in early 1996. I see that this company APPLIED for their patent in 1999.
While I know that our system was one of the early testing systems available - it was by no means the only one.
Again, another example of an utterly failed patent system awarding patents where prior art is VERY obvious.
So these guys patented online testing, huh? Does the US patent office even care to research before granting a patent? In the article, it doesn't even say that the recipients of the patent claim to have invented online testing. So they just happened to notice the lack of said patent for an idea that wasn't theirs and thought, "Hey, there's no patent for this, let's make us some bucks!"
I can imagine their think-session 4 years ago...
"Say, Jim, this internet thing seems to be catching on."
"Yup."
"Maybe we can make some money from it."
"Yup."
"I gots an idear. Let's make a list of all the common things we do with the internet, then let's go search the patent archives to find which from the list haven't been patented, and then we'll patent them and force people to pay us for them."
"Yup."
"It's a go. Waahoo! Neudge!"
How are you going to keep them down on the farm once they've seen Karl Hungus?
My favourite line in the whole article is made by Mr. Posch at the end of the story:
... They applied in 1999 for this! I had already written online test sites, with accompanying software for both teachers and students (even embedded MySQL in the LAN Server installation version of the software, and the MySQL ODBC driver in the LAN client version!.) Also, I seem to remember this tiny company in Redmond, Washington offering some tests online through their MSDN program. And then there was that nobody of a company in New York, offering exams via the internet for S/390 AS/400 AIX etc. etc. Brown Institute has been whining about tests online since '98 ... it goes on and on with VERY obvious known examples of prior art!
"We're trying to give them the impression that we want to work with them."
So, does this mean the DON'T want to work with them? How do you "try" to give an impression? Couldn't that be considered slightly redundant?
My problems this whole patent (an most others lately) are 1) There's the matter of "prior art"
And then 2) it's OBVIOUS AS ALL HELL! Non-proxied distance learning (including exams) are decades old -- hell, Meathead's wife was droning on about them back in the early 80's -- adding the internet as the base media is as obvious as adding the post was, and adding teleconferences, and adding VCR's (and even LaserDiscs for a while). I was under the impression that prior art and blatant obviousness were both disqualifiers for a patent; what about the combination? Is it like simple math -- prior art? That's 1 negative! oh, it's also obvious? That's another! lets see now, we have two negatives, bad things multiply problems it must be a good patent then!
Seriosuly given how well things have gone with SBC's patent perhaps its time to collect prior art examples of this and post them onto /. Can anyone think of a test that (in their humble opinion) occured online and met the standards of this patent before February 11th 1999?
Yep, preview works. I guess I owe a licensing fee now.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I am no lawyer, but these seem like seemingly trivial patents. How do these things get through the system? Are the patents more complex than presented here on /. and actually do contribute to something or are the patent clerks just overworked and underpaid. It would be nice to do a followup on all the patents /. has listed to see if they are still in effect or have been thrown out as dumb.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
These people have an online traffic school that ends with, guess what, an online test!
Domain Name: ONLINETRAFFICSCHOOL.COM
Status: ACTIVE
Creation Date: 19-nov-1997
[whois.opensrs.net]
Registrant:
Online Traffic School
645 Fourth Street
Santa Rosa, CA 95404
US
The Patent Office is going to grant somebody a patent for ... patent. Or Patent Office.
If you want to holla back at the USPTO, and tell them how much prior art has gone through these precise methods, you can mail them the below addresses, quoted from the USPTO site:
----------
Please address mail to be delivered by the United States Postal Service
(USPS) as follows:
Box
Commissioner for Patents
Washington, D.C. 20231
Please address mail to be delivered by other delivery services (Federal
Express (Fed Ex), UPS, DHL, Laser, Action, Purolater, etc.) as follows:
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
2011 South Clark Place
Customer Window, Box
Crystal Plaza Two, Lobby, Room 1B03
Arlington, Virginia 22202
---------
You can also call them at: 800-PTO-9199 (800-786-9199) or 703-308-HELP (703-308-4357)
Personally, I'd quote them a dozen or so sites that use online tests regularly, especially for-profit (i guess thespark.com doesn't qualify =P) and then mention the general case of Universities, who are slowly moving towards great use of online tests to ease their administrative loads. I'm sure enough comments can get a patent reviewed.
-Steve
According to the uspto web site this patent was filed in September 1999. I remember reading an article in Java Pro magazine around the same time on how to build a test flexible testing web-app using servlets, and xml.
A quick google search produced this article by Claude Duguay in April 1999. Six months before "Inventors" Anderson and Stack filed their patent.
The article is a bit dry, but provides excellent instruction for anyone considering to build an online testing application. The original magazine publication included all the source code. (The online version requires you to be a JavaPro subscriber to download the code.)
And at least the European Patent Office keeps repeating that they will never ever grant patents for this kind of stuff (pure business methods, with only the new feature being that you can earn money with it), so the solution for others is quite simple: put your server in Europe and chances of winning an infringement case will surely rise.
The Department of Defense was using the internet for "online testing" long before these schmucks came along.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
No way this will ever hold up in court. As long as thespark.net stays in buisness, there is no fucking way
What about IQ tests? I took some online in 1996. And there's all that purity test sillyness.
How do I determine if it is prior art? What do I do if it is?
26% pure and counting.
Yeah, we had this at CMU back in the late 80's.
Which brings me to a funny story. There was this one "logic" class that was taken almost entirely online, tests and all, except for some optional lectures. I was dating this really dumb girl at the time ("blonde, all the way to the brain stem"), who just didn't get *anything* about the class. And she kept going to the professor and complaining that it was too hard, and it didn't make sense, and so on.
So I think she ended up with a D for the class, which was probably generous, and she went to complain one final time. At that meeting the professor *admitted* to her that the whole thing was a sham. It wasn't a logic class at all. It was in reality, a giant psychological test to study how people react under extreme stress. And she was one of the subjects. She was vindicated! She knew it all along!
Now I knew the professor, and he was a really cool guy, with just a bit of a mean streak. Of course CMU wouldn't let a professor conduct a covert semester-long psych experiment on students. (And a math professor at that.) That guy must still laugh about the story he told to this poor girl. I know I do.
Anyway, my point was... oh yeah, the prior art thing.
For all you old geezers who know everything, just skip this, but for those truly curious about how patents have gotten so out of hand, you may find this common knowledge of use.
Before the Great Depression, there was a very similar state of patent affairs to what we have now. The laws were worded in a way that gave patent holders enormous rights and patent holders tended to win in court.
During the reforms that took place after the Depression, patents were seen as monopolistic and were closely watched by a division of the Justice Department called Antitrust. In courts, the value of patents was distinctly weakened to the point that patent holders tended to lose in court and patents became an unprofitable way to manage one's business.
These anti-patent reforms were in place through the growth decades from the end of the war and into the sixties allowing many of our favorite toys like the Xerox GUI based PC to come into existence relatively free of patent issues. If you're old enough, you might even remember hearing about consent decrees on the news at night when you were a kid. They used to be common, but I haven't heard the phrase in the headlines in decades although that's no mystery.
In the 80s, an odd but charismatic man was elected president in a tide of big business friendly politics and himself and his associates immediately reformed the legal system regarding patents by creating a brand new court that specialized in patent cases only. This new court was called the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit AKA, the CAFC and it essentially reversed the reforms that had taken place since the Great Depression.
Subsequently a great bubble formed in the stock market and then. . .