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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. "
I think I stopped reading shortly after that point, it would have hurt too much to continue.
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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.