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Blackboard Patenting Educational Groupware
chizz writes "Online learning provider Blackboard announced the other day that it has patented the Learning Management System (LMS). The very same day it went after Desire2Learn for Patent infringement in a truly Salt Lake City kinda way. A great many educators are a bit shook up by this, and are stockpiling prior art all over the place. "
We were talking about this on a UK ml the other day; there are a number of Moodle people worried about this.
It's a patent so bad it looks like the EPO won't grant it. Which is really saying something.
"Elmo knows where you live!" - The Simpsons
If they can prove in a court of law that there is prior art, I don't see what the fuss is all about. Whatever stupid patent the attacking company shows, it will be laughed out of court and will probably be declared null and void.
Of course, that's assuming the judge involved in this case still has functioning grey matter, which may be a bit too optmistic. Then again, SCO is in dire straits, so there is still hope...
One thing is certain though: this case proves, if that was still needed, that the US Patent Office does not have any grey matter left. I mean, another (fairly-obvious-sounding) patent that could be invalidated with prior art? How many of these exist out there "in the wild", to be used by rich b______s?
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Blackboard was garbage until GWU sold them Prometheus, which practically makes up their Blackboard software now. Can you patent something somebody made without patenting and sold to you?
If Ford built a car and sold it to you without patenting it, could you then turn around and patent it?
According to the filing, the party whose bogus patent is allegedly being infringed is incorporated in Delaware and has its primary office in Washington D.C., while the alleged infringer is a Canadian company.
But the suit itself is being filed in Texas, and the suit names statutes that give the court jurisdiction.
Does this mean they chose this court because it's run by Bushies who instinctively love monoplizers and hate entrepreneurs? Or is there another reason for this choice of venue?
In a logical world, you'd expect the lawsuit to be filed where one or the other of the companies has its HQ.
I know, it's not a logical world. The USPTO proves that. But this geographical silliness is another example of the general legal ludicrosities we USians now deal with instead of having sensible laws and courts.
Fah!
- Robin
Not just the company, but the product.
When released their Blackboard 6 software caused all kinds of trouble in time lost and support at my college, to the point where a Bb rep came out to apologize to IT and the instructors. One instructor stood up and demanded that Bb make reparations for money spent in lost time.
My college also uses them for student organizations. But I'll tell you, Google Groups and independent hosting makes for a more effective solution. For one, a Blackboard cluster doesn't share session data across servers--each server maintains session data locally, which means you can't use HTML links to point to resources within Blackboard, from within Blackboard. In fact, you can't hardlink to a Blackboard resource, period.
The discussion board software is designed to be reset after every semester, which means you have to delete and recreate a Blackboard module each time, which leads to more work for instructors. The semester-centric view also makes the discussion software clunky for student organizations, which only reset once per year, if at all. I have to sift through comments dating back to September of last year before I get to recent material. Plus, there's no way to archive and search the comments.
The announcement mechanism doesn't support RSS, or even--as far as I can find--a way to send out emails automatically when announcements are created.
I could go on...I've been bending this software to my needs for a few years now.
I wish I could put my name to this, but I won't. I'm a little too paranoid for that.
Here's Martin Dougiamas' comments on this topic... he's Mr. Moodle, it seems. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=50597#23 1617 very clearly states there's no need to panic. Surprisingly, Australia and New Zealand have already allowed this patetnt, though!
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Aside from being slow and ugly, it is one of the buggiest pieces of software I have ever used. Whenever I go to check my grades it will say something like 10 points possible for assignment, your score 7, class average 11.2. This thing is worse than Diebold.
I certainly hope that nothing comes of this. D2L isn't any sort of super rich business, and I certainly do not want to have to tell a campus full of neophyte Professors and students that they have to learn a new system. Heck, it's not like D2L exactly puts on a good front for the online learning aides that are out there. One of the most frequent calls that my help desk gets is a new problem has arisen with D2L.
Anyone who has worked in the IT department of a school/school district has had to deal with the HORRIBLE software that ripoff-artists like Blackboard manage to sell to clueless managers.
I would venture to say that the vast majority of software marketed to schools/universities is pure crap. And the best part is, it's MASSIVELY overpriced, too, since most schools get government grants to buy this stuff (and, again, the people who approve these purchases generally have no idea what the stuff is worth).
Screw all of the educational software companies. They're leeches feeding of the ignorance of stupid administrators and pork-barrel funding.
I'm at the Desire2Learn User's Conference right now in Guelph, Ontario. The buzz here is that the whole patent is ludicrous and only serves to further D2Ls status as a major player in the LMS space.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
As a Blackboard administrator this patent disturbs me. The level of support that this company provides is poor on most occasions and for them to be able to limit any choice I have to use an alternative, esp. an Open Source option like Moodle, is bad for my school. I have a feeling this patent will not stand.
Is there anyone here on the Sakai team, or other Sakai users who can shed some light on this issue?
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Comes from my experience at school. My university uses Blackboard to administer tests and quizzes, disseminate documents, track grades, etc. The administration has made a big push to have all the faculty use it, but their has been a big push back because Blackboard has been terrible to work with.
The biggest deal has been its tendency to erase grades, lose testing results, etc. It has been a nightmare for students and teachers a like. That aside, talking with the IT administrative staff, Blackboard has a tendency to defer responsibility to other problems, even though time and time again, blame clearly falls on bugs in their software. This annoyed a lot of people, so much in fact, that the IS department faculty have started an initiative to code a new one, from scratch, in Java.
So what would Blackboard's natural response be to customers deciding that they can create their own CMS? Why not patent it? Then they're locked into using their software! May the patent Gods strike this one down quick!
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
For the life of me, this is one of those patents that is so obvious and has so much prior art that is makes you think the patent office is a rubber stamp for industry. Oh wait.
TO: USPTO
FROM: Clue Stick
RE: Blackboard patent
Read this:
Online Learning Timeline
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Reading the patent - it's clear that if an instructor set up a Yahoo group to upload files, give students access to certain file and the ability to upload their own files and communicate with each other - that it would be infringing on the patent! And yet, this has been something that we could do since the days of eGroups - can that be called prior art? Jeepers - I can see cases of prior art everywhere given the far reach of this patent!
Considering in the LMS world - blackboard is barely a blip:
I am sure that companies like IBM, SumTotal Systems, Plateau, Saba, Oracle (iLearning), and Learn.com will have plenty to say about it. Especially since several of these companies (or generally pieces of these companies - since they tend to merge a lot in the LMS world) have had working LMS systems for far longer than Blackboard has been in existence.
Hell, when SumTotal Systems acquired Pathlore Software (which is all the way from Goul - they inherited more than 20 years worth of LMS code... we are talking mainframe days here - and I hear that a lot of that stuff is still running. Prior art abounds... this is a horrible patent anyway.
The patent debate has so many tables to eat from, I don't need to toss you crumbs, but entire repasts. Here are some things to think about:
:-)
- Can one define new open standards in a world with software patents?
- How are software patents different from business method patents?
- What does it mean to "patent software"? Are such patents not in fact patents on ideas?
- When should government create monopolies as a tool of trade? Should this be done by burocrats and specialists who live off the resulting conflicts?
- Are patents (software and other) a measurement of innovation? If so, are they cause, or effect?
- If patents are a cause of innovation, can this be proven? Does, for instance, the requirement for universities to patent their research result in more innovation, or less innovation? Is there any empircal proof, anywhere, that patents drive innovation? Have we seen this in the IT business?
- If patents are an effect of innovation, how does that work? Can we derive models that show the relationships between innovation, wealth, and evolving forms of ownership?
- Are there other parallels for software patents? E.g. traditional land ownership vs. modern land ownership?
- What is the political orientation of patents? Are they a capitalist, socialist, fascist, or apolitical form of ownership?
- If I fight software patents (which I do) does that make me an anti-property leftwing radical? Or rather a free-market right-wing pro-competition radical?
- What are the links between software patents and globalization? How are software patents used to impose US economic policy abroad?
- How do copyright and patent, two forms of intellectual property, operate in a domain like software where they can both be applied but at different levels? Do authors and inventors really have a choice between the two tools?
- Who really benefits from the patent system? Cui bono?
- What is the end-game, assuming everything is patentable, and he with the most lawyers wins? Is this necessarily a bad scenario? How long will it last for?
- Have software patents any precursors in history? Is this an old story we're doomed to repeat?
Each of these is enough for a doctoral thesis. Please comment...
My blog
Zope Corp used to have Zope4Edu, and Duke University was helping with it. Now it's not listed as a product on zope.com, but it is mentioned in their "about" page. Anyone have experience with it? Wonder if BB would sue them.
1. The patent relies on 44 claims, most of which can easily be shown to be prior art. (Ironically, WebCT, which was bought out by BlackBoard might be used as a counterexample of prior art).
Each claim stands or falls on its own. In other words, if a competitor is infringing just *one* of those claims, it doesn't matter whether every other claim is invalidated.
3. To violate the Patent you would have to be substantially equivalent. Essentially this means someone would have to substantially rely on Blackboard's look and feel for providing LMS services.
The infringing product only has to be substantially equivalent to what is CLAIMED. Blackboard's specific implementation is completely irrelevant to the patent, unless the details of that implementation are actually recited in the claims.
4. The patent heavily relies on the concept of "files" - like our old system, which used flat files for information management (no, we did not and could not develop for the then popular (1998-1999) Sun + Oracle combo -- too big and too expensive for us and most schools at the time). An LMS using a Relational Database may be sufficiently different enough in implementation.
How are relational databases implemented? See "substantially equivalent" above. Also, while I haven't read the claims, I suspect plenty of them are completely silent WRT to file-based implementation.
5. The patent differention seems to be at this part:
"The present invention also enhances the prior art by providing a flexible infrastructure for colleges, universities, and other institutions wishing to facilitate on-line registration and tuition payment. More specifically, the present invention can accommodate different billing methods, including, but not limited to, billing on a per-credit-hour basis, and billing on a per-registrant basis."
Again, a patent is all about what is CLAIMED. Unless this sentence is recited in the claims, it will most likely be irrelevant to any patent litigation.
- Neither of these systems is at all friendly to Linux -
As a Linux admin using Blackboard, I can tell you that this far from the truth. I run Blackboard and I can tell you in general it runs very smoothly. The major issues I have revolve around the initial hardware specs than anything else. There are a few issues (which can be foun on their website) but the knowledge base and their TSMs seem to have a work around for most of them.
The big issue actually being the assessments losing answers has a work around with removing multiple attempts and I have been told by support that they will be releasing a fix for this issue.
All in all, I find that the latest version (7.1) is very Firefox friendly and even works well on Safari. I actually feel that it is best served by Firefox than by IE.
-- Too Lazy to sign up for an account.