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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.""
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?
If not, you do not have prior art because your situation does not meet all of the patents claims. The good news, as I said earlier, there are lots of ways to write online tests that do not infringe on this patent.