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US Patent Office To Re-Examine Blackboard Patent
Mr_5tein writes "Groklaw is reporting that the US Patent and Trademark Office has just ordered a re-examination of the e-learning patent owned by Blackboard Inc, thanks to a filing by the Software Freedom Law Center. SFLC's press release states, 'The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC's request raises "a substantial new question of patentability" regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent...' The SFLC explains that though such re-examinations may take a couple of years to complete, approximately '70% of re-examinations are successful in having a patent narrowed or completely revoked.'"
Its good that there are agencies out there that look for bad patents and bring them to the gov't's attention, but it would be much better if the patent clerks did a better job screening the patents, or these challenges came during the comment period.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
I read the title and I thought: "Hey, has someone patented the blackboard? Cool!"
-- Cheers!
I develop educational software myself, so I'm very pleased with this. Two points seem to be especially interesting:
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
For years, the patent office was granting patents based upon adding the words "Internet based" to what was otherwise an unoriginal idea.
...wait for it.... "digital".
Education? Not new.
"But its on the Internet". Hey! That's new!
There are still literally thousands of patents floating around that were based on this mindless logic, and it still happens today.
Just last week, Microsoft patented a "digital means of recording one's life history". One might call it a diary -- or a time capsule,
but no this was something new. Why? Because its
Sigh.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I guess it would be pretty difficult for them to get over the prior art issue, considering they started in 1997. Maybe they're contending that all that other elearning before they even existed wasn't REAL elearning.
;)
As I work for a company that would have been negatively affected by this patent, I am really glad that this is happening. We've had "prior art" elearning related to basically all of their patents since 1995/96 specifically in a web-based format. Now watch the stock ticker on their site go zooming down once this actually goes through.
I think that, like frivilous lawsuits, frivilous patents should have equally painful repercussions. Blackboard should have to pay anyone showing reasonable claim to prior art a penalty for this
It's interesting that government dollars--uh, our dollars--are used to spend "years" to determine if a commercial interest may continue to make money from this patent.
Go captialism?
The free exchange of information should be free and open to all without regard to class, race, religion, etc.
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
Do I have to pay them royalties if I use chalk?
This might explain why the USPTO shows so little interest in making sure that the patents it awards are of high quality. For the USPTO it makes absolutely no economic sense to it spend more time on individual patents than the absolute minimum.
After all, there is this appeal procedure right? So if people have objections to patents we issue they can use that. In the mean time, when you're paid by the item it makes absolutely no sense to spend too much time perfecting each item you make. And if people out there don't like a patent we issue, then they can pay us a fee for a review procedure.
Simple economics really. That's what management is all about, right?
Actually it would be best of all if patents didn't exist at all. Patents are not an incentive, not a property, but a tool of coercion, they are a tool of violence. If your factory has an invention that you don't have permission to use, then men with guns have a "rigt" to visit you and rip it out. This tool of violence was responsible for lawsuits in the world court to halt the manufacture of generic AIDS drugs, and the resulting death of millions of people in Africa. This tool of violence was used to hold back air-bags and anti lock breaks in cars for nearly twenty years while over a million people died who didn't need to. This tool of violence is responsible for every industry and every manufactuor having incompatable parts and the massive costs and enviromental damage that leads to. This tool of violence is repsonsible for whole classes of drugs that have bizare chemichal side effects, that needn't be there except for the sake of patentability. This tool of violence saddles nearly every high tech startup with tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of protective legal manuvers before they even sell a product. Almost every technology market has a 20 year lag time between discovery and marketability, hmmmm why is that?
This tool of violence tends to punish and isolate researchers, because ones who collaberate are punished - then people say "well ge golly, why are those inventors such lonely tinkerers?" This tool of violence tends to drive up R&D costs by orders of magnitude, then people say "well ge golly, why is pharmacutical R&D so expensive?" Well dammit.
Anyone knows how much work is involved in checking up if those claims are valid or not? I seem to be underestimating the task. I would have expected that this was something that could be handed off to an intern to just run off a checklist: yes|no
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
To higher ed faculty who are unaware, Available is a modern day web appication, free alternative to BB, et al.
Schools have enough problems from budgeting to staffing. Cansomeone explain to me if their's a compelling reason no to use a freeware solution?
A quick and dirty summary.
The Patent seen at Google
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
I guess its back to the old drawing board...
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
As an LMS tech at a community college, I'm very hopeful that this will be reversed. I've evaluated several LMS's because we are currently near the end of our contract with our current one, and there's really nothing that Blackboard does that is very different than what everybody else offers. Right now, we're looking into Moodle and Sakai, as well as some commercial products.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Having VERY intimate knowledge of Bb (no, NOT an employee), I can tell you for a fact they are the quintessential bullies: they may be the biggest kid on the block, but they're none too smart.
They treat a good many customers as if Bb was the customer -- they are constantly issuing demands, determining their own timelines/deadlines. For example, they've been known to contact a school and say, "hey, we're taking your server down for maintenance/updates at such-and-such time, so be ready" instead of "when's a good time to do that?". They honestly feel these schools have no other choice as far as software, but a good many of their customers are waking up to the fact that Angel et al. are superior in most - if not all - aspects.
My opinion is the folks at the top KNOW their software just doesn't stack up well against the competition and that's why they're such thugs and so vehement in this whole patent mess. They probably figure "well, if we prevail in this patent mess, we can just license it out to these other vendors, make a nice fat percentage off that, and not even bother producing our own software anymore."
A good plan I guess. Make a piece off every distance learning program and lay off almost every staff member. That would make for a hell of an ROI.
BTW, be warned: I'm following Bb's lead of patenting a concept by patenting: the wheel, the lever, gardening, internal combustion engines, electicity, underwear, English AND Spanish language, and supermodels. Definitely supermodels.
My university uses Blackboard, which I am very displeased with for one reason: I cannot submit assignments on any *NIX system. Why, you ask? There seems to be a bit of JavaScript on the upload page that checks to make sure the file path contains a drive letter followed by ":\\"
Congratulations on totally disregarding Mac and *NIX users, Blackboard! This is especially frustrating and ironic because the only class that I submit assignments to via this upload system is "UNIX Programming."
Sigh...
Typically tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of dollars in attorney fees for the patent owner and hundreds of man hours for some of the most experienced patent examiners at the USPTO. A reexamination is a complex legal proceeding that involves a lot more than a checklist. Reexaminations can easily last 10-15 years, so this decision doesn't really mean anything yet.
A good example is the patent from the Blackberry (NTP v. RIM) suit. RIM settled for over $600 million dollars but NTP's patent is still in reexamination (as it has been for several years now). NTP is even threatening others (Palm) with the patent while it is in rexam.
The benefit to public when the USPTO grants a reexamination is that courts will often stay (put on hold) a patent infringement suit until the reexamination is concluded.
There was no reason for the parent post to be http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=218926&cid=177 69878 modded down
It hasn't gone unnoticed that the people who bitterly wined about it couldn't make a counter claim, why? Because they know that if they claim that it's "property", or that it "protects" inventors, or that it "incentivizes" high cost R&D, they would be called on their BS. So their only option left was to wine and attack me personally. Well, fine. I take it as a compliment, but the parent point is still valid and deserves to be recognized as such.
The abuse of patents has become so widespread that it is time to drop the concept. If someone can implement a product or service, good for them. If they can sell that product or service and provide their customers to satisfaction, great. But when some coat tailing company that filed a patent 3 years ago comes stomping in to collect on something they did nothing to produce, market, and support this is just wrong. Costs of producing anything will continue to skyrocket because of this behavior. So why bother? If I knew someone was going to come out of the woodwork to collect, I wouldn't bother, and the time necessary to investigate all potential patents that might infringe is too costly. Look at the video game industry, its amazing how they have been burned by this kind of activity. Patents are wrong and are against all tenents of capital economies.
by not granting patents and closing the uspto down.
The patent system is yet another case where old laws don't sufficiently extend to current technology. Patents were originally targeted at physical inventions. That realm moves at a much slower pace than computer software. I think the U.S. would be much better off without software patents allowed at all. But assuming there are here to stay for a long time, other reforms that would greatly cut down on the nonsense patents would be:
- Greatly reduce the duration of software patents. If they only lasted 5 years or less, there'd be somewhat less interest in filing for them.
- Issue them only to individuals, not corporations. This is sort of the case right now as individual names are always listed on patents. But corporations then take ownership of them. The rights should be permanently stuck to the person(s) it was issued to.
- Make them non-transferrable. If corporations want to amass a huge patent portfolio, they better keep those individual patent owners happily employed.
- Have Congress create better rules for handling patent disputes. Get the endless litigation out of our court system. Put the power back in the hands of the inventors and prevent bullying of those who don't have large resources for legal defense.
Obviously a lot of the problems with the patent system are a reflection of problems in the U.S. legal system, and the expenses it incurs, so improving patents requires much broader legislative work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_le arning_environments
Very comprehensive article that shows prior art for most (or all) of what Blackboard claims.
Table-ized A.I.