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All 44 Blackboard Patent Claims Invalidated
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The US Patent & Trademark Office has invalidated all 44 claims in Blackboard's patent. While this is a non-final action [PDF], which means that Blackboard will be able to appeal, it does represent a win for the Software Freedom Law Center which had requested the reexamination of Blackboard's patent. It is not yet known how this will affect the $3.1M judgment Blackboard won from Desire2Learn."
Blackboard's software is slow and bloated (due to their reliance on Java). I was really annoyed when my school switched from WebCT to Blackboard and hopefully this will give them motivation to switch to something else.
I'll drink to that. The version we use is slow, buggy, and completely unintuitive. For most ./ers that doesn't mean much, but when you're trying to guide a room full of PhDs through the process of posting assignments and grades it's a different story.
I think Blackboards problem is that they tried to jam too many features in and didn't worry enough about ease of use and navigation.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
I fully agree. I hate blackboard... from the buggy sessions (timeout requires browser reset), to the incredible complexity that prevents most features from being used effectively, Blackboard is a mess. For each of the tools inside of the software suite, there is a simpler, free alternative. I really hope they are forced to re-evaluate their design.
The only thing this ruling should show to the courts is that the USPTO is a POS. They were the ones who approved those patents, so if all of them were invalid what does that say? That they don't search very hard for "prior art", is what it says to me. In this age of information technology, the only thing governments granting the monopolies more monopolies on things does is take more money from consumers and hurt everyone. We'd all have a lot more money and more free time to come up with new products if we weren't so overworked from stuffing billionaire's pockets. Of course the worst offense are software patents, the most ridiculous kind since it's extremely obvious making software to perform any task, which makes it much more of a patenting an "idea" than most any other kind of patent.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
On the face of it, since the case against Desire2Learn was a patent suit, and that patent has been invalidated, then Desire2Learn shouldn't have to pay a dime of the judgement and can continue sales in the U.S.
Of course, since lawyers are going to be involved in this, who knows what will really happen.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I've had many classes at two different institutions.
I've never had a class that actually used the system. At best, they would put a syllabus on the website. MAYBE they would even put a grade or two. And the classes that I had that put grades up, it would be like the first homework grade and nothing else.
For all the money schools put into buying and maintaining these systems, it seems like it's not for any purpose.
Only a year ago Blackboard wouldn't run without allowing activeX. Dosen't sound like they're much better off now.
.. was missed, if I scanned the text properly:
Quote: "PLATO originated in the early 1960's at the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois. Professor Don Bitzer became interested in using computers for teaching, and with some colleagues founded the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL). Bitzer, an electrical engineer, collaborated with a few other engineers to design the PLATO hardware. To write the software, he collected a staff of creative eccentrics ranging from university professors to high school students, few of whom had any computer background. Together they built a system that was at least a decade ahead of its time in many ways." (emphasis mine)
Please note that they had a place for "eccentrics" back then.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Have to chalk it up to bad luck.
I record my sleeptalking
Try using blackboard with a screen reader. It is from satan. Whomever they sued should be gibven their entire company and make their horrible software die a quick but agonizing death. oh, and the mp3 is kludge
I found these remarks in the comments of TFA very interesting, and I assume they are genuine.
And this commentator is not alone. I hear from many people who once defended software patents, even those who own them and have profited, that secretly or even openly they believe they are immoral and wrong. The problem has always been that since they were allowed it's been a defensive measure to acquire them.
We have to go back to the source and overturn this awful mistake that was made. The world does not accept software and business patents. Proponents of it can shout and scream all they like, and maybe many will lose a lot of money they wasted on these things, but at the end of the day humanity will be better once we lay this monster to rest. I hope this is the start of a domino effect that starts to bring down all the bogus patents made in bad faith. Only those on real manufacturable goods should stand.
I had all bust lost hope for this system of handling "IP". But this story brings me the slightest of hope.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How do you get 44 patents on a black piece of slate?
1) Any patent lawsuit against a user of a software component used by major vendors will automatically result in those vendors lending legal support to reduce the chance that their own customers will also end up being sued.
2) Any patent lawsuit costs the suing party at least several hundred thousand dollars.
3) Any patent put before the courts is at very great risk of being destroyed by prior art.
4) Any payout awarded from a single end user has to be in proportion to value of the patented technology. The value of a single instance will could only be measured in hundreds of dollars, not coming close to covering the costs of the lawsuit to the platiff.
5) Patent lawsuits take six years to over a decade to work it's way though appeals.
6) Developers will release new software using a method that circumvents the patent in question within two months. This will be quickly adopted and by the time the first patent case is resolved there will be no further customers for the patent holder to sue.
7) The outrage generated in taking out a case against any open source will result in Groklaw and other groups putting the suing party and their lawyers under the closest scrutiny. You will not believe the level of bad publicity, let alone the the amount of prior art, dirty business practices, and legal suspect practices and even violation of statutes that will be uncovered.
Lastly to quote Pulp Fiction, and then "we are going to get medieval on your ass."
Any IP case against users of open source puts the attacker at a far greater risk.
The real problem is the total obviousness of most of the patents they're approving.
Then again, they're getting paid to approve patents, not to reject them so should we be surprised?
No sig today...
I think I first learned about Knowledge Forum from Andy at a party we attended in 1997, but I think it was already by then a mature product.
(While Knowledge Forum is proprietary, ZooLib is Open Source under the MIT license, and IMHO the best thing since sliced bread.)
Well I guess the patent is already overturned, but I doubt it's the last we'll see of educational software patents, so maybe Knowledge Forum can serve as prior art for future cases.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Software Freedom Law Center
1995 Broadway, 17th floor
New York, NY 10023
They're a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, so if you're in the US, your contribution will be tax-deductible.
It's expensive to fight lawsuits. Vote with your wallet!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Have the USPTO also fired the incompetent patent officers who approved those patents in the first place?
As has now been unearthed, they didn't properly check their sources, misquoting a Senate (by taking too few words, out of context, as their famous citation) which had actually said:
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I RTFA, I read the comments, I searched a little, but yet I still know nothing about this article. It's like reading a sentence with no subject. I don't know what it's ABOUT. I gather that Blackboard makes some kind of software for use in education. What is the basis for patent claims? Where are they using these patents? Who is infringing?
I really wish that the law didn't use normal english words like "obviousness" because time and time again I see comments like this that demonstrate to me (as someone who has worked in patent law) that the public (i.e. slashdot readers) don't know anything about how patent law works. When Patent people talk about "obviousness" they do not mean the dictionary definition! To make an obviousness objection stick you have to have a pretty close citation already, maybe only missing one feature of the claim (yes, I'm sorry you're going to have to actually read the claims in light of the description). Then you need another close citation with that missing feature and motivation, some sort of explanation why you want to put these two together. Motivation is not an ex post facto analysis along the lines of "oh, I could have thought of that". Preferably the second citation might actually say something like "the use of missing feature X helps wizzle the wozzle". Not forgetting that you might have to demonstrate somehow that the skilled man might actually be aware of what are sometimes two very disparate citations. It's not always as obvious as you think.
A number of small and medium sized schools are going to Moodle and customizing it for their environment (for example, incorporating home-grown services into it, etc). Moodle's been growing by leaps and bounds the last year or two, and I expect it's going to keep growing. Sakai's harder to implement, unless you have a herd of Java developers at your disposal. Faculty always want significant local customization.
My school uses it and I hate it for a plethora of reasons:
1. No Friefox support. It's annoying that I have to actually use IE or something just to access one site.
2. This isn't a problem with Blackboard in an of itself, per se, but because teachers can post assignments there, they often feel the need to not mention homework at all and just expect us to check it nightly. For every class. This is sheer laziness. I'm a full time college student and I also have a part time job almost every night after classes as well as on most weekends. I don't have the time, motivation, or energy to double check for possible assignments every night. And it takes all of 10 seconds to tell a class of an assignment or to at least look for it as they LEAVE class.
3. It's slow and bloated, as mentioned above. Add reason 2 to this and it's an unnecessary waste of time.
Desire2Learn is local here in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
They were devastated by the earlier court ruling, and now this?
Here is an article from the local newspaper on the topic.
Note: RIM is also local here, and NTP's affair with them was closely followed.
Time to revamp how patents are issued, or have the USPTO pay the court damages due to wrongly issued patents.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
4) Any payout awarded from a single end user has to be in proportion to value of the patented technology. The value of a single instance will could only be measured in hundreds of dollars, not coming close to covering the costs of the lawsuit to the platiff.
Tell that to RIM.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
RIM was not an end user.
As a later college attendee, I like to take online course more then in class, classes. Whenever the class is on Blackboard I shake my head because I know that the system will generally be intrusive and annoying.
I really like Moodle though. That generally works really well.
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At our school, Blackboard was set up with the thought of, "Hey, let's start offering online course content. We'll buy Blackboard and it will be our silver bullet."
NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!
When students started buying computers with Vista, Blackboard would not play right with them. They had all kinds of issues. It won't even play right with Internet Explorer at our school. I'm just glad I'm not the Blackboard admin.
Note to my college administration:
Ever wonder why the University of Phoenix is so expensive? It's because they attempted to take the time to design their online program from the ground up. They also hired the staff to make it work. That takes a lot of money. They didn't take the cheap way out by buying Blackboard and saying, "Now we are an online school." F$%^tards!!!! You would have been better off by using Moodle or Double Choco Latte. At least you wouldn't have blown all that money. Dare I say that you are once again "trying to polish the turd"?
Friends don't let friends line-dance.
Where I went to school, there were various rules to safeguard students from these types of unprofessional shenanigans from teachers.
You can't take the sky from me...
Pharmacies take in a written description of precisely what to do, enter it in a computer, look for blinking text indicating a possible contradiction, then have a robot dispense the required pills into a bottle, stick on a label, and hand it to the customer with a computer-printed description of the side effects. That's nothing compared to what the USPTO has to do.
Pharmacists once required extensive training because they had to mix, compound, and measure the medicines. Today they are literally just dispensing pills under the direction of a computer. The years they spend in school are an artifact of a bygone era, and my guess is that most pharmacists will be replaced with soda-machine like automated dispensers in just a few years.
At my college we use Blackboard products as our Learning Management system. When Blackboard won part of the lawsuit against Desire2Learn, several faculty raised the issue of Blackboard's behavior with administration. Surprisingly, administration was receptive, and we now have a committee to re-evaluate our use of Blackboard products and take a second look at competing products. Unfortunately, Blackboard's behavior is an embarassment for their customers. Also for those that are wondering, if Blackboard doesn't play nice with the academic community, or their competitors, do you think they always play nice with their customers (who are the administrators not the teachers). If you as an instructor are dissatisfied with Blackboard you may be surprised to find that administration may be more receptive to listening because of the lawsuit.
Interestingly, in our department we use good old fashioned FTP.
Professors have logins - they can drag and drop word documents, excel files with grades, or whatever else they want (maps primarily, or related data, in this case.)
And it works fine. Students go to a website, download material, and bam. Done. Files can be uploaded to seperate servers. Takes *Far* less training than teaching *anyone* how to use the mess that was WebCT and now is Blackboard.
time for the proper people to be paid off, thus assuring the continuation of the patent.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Here in Cambridge we use http://sakaiproject.org/ for our document distribution and collaboration - and it works pretty damn nicely - all the lectures are shoved up in folders for courses that you can either join or be invited to. I don't know what other features Blackboard has, but we also have separate systems for grade reporting and exam signups.
note my lack of ignorance due to the fact that i m not an american citizen but .. cant somebody like d2l sue the uspto for their performance?
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
...someone patented the BOFH? http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard_Indexes.html
Tech Support: "No, sir...clicking on 'Remember Password' will NOT help you remember your password."
I also like how a minor version upgrade of Blackboard seemed to always require 6-12 hours of downtime while IT staff sorts it out. Real convenient in the middle of the semester.
Seems to be about on par with the Diebold voting system in terms of quality. Woe be the day their source code is leaked for the world to see.
Blackboard works on firefox at my uni (Bristol) - not that im defending it, its a depressingly slow pos.
I know one software patent examiner who told me: You can find prior art on almost anything, if you have the time (as an examiner) to search for it. Trouble is, the USPTO doesn't let their examiners take months to search the field for prior art. They get X number of hours. That's the reality. This ruling shows the system sort of works - with only X number of hours to search, obviously many patents are going to be granted when there was actually prior art, and the way to counter this is through the courts. (Currently.) The indication of a broken system would be if the courts couldn't invalidate the patents, or if they did enjoin alleged violators throughout the lengthy appeal process (which would tilt the field sharply in favor of big corporations).
I fail to see anything innovative in Blackboard's product. See my journal entry. The bogus web app I mentioned was Blackboard's. I'm not sure but it's quite likely they still have patent rights for their crapware here in China.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
A patent must have "novelty" - i.e. Be something which a person who is skilled in the trade wouldn't immediately think of if confronted with the need.
When I look at patents like 20050023524 or 20040230959 I know for sure that that patent office isn't applying any such criteria.
Then again, most years somebody slips a patent for the wheel past them "just for fun" and patents like 6368227 clearly show that the examiners drink too much beer at lunch time and just rubber stamp whatever's on their desk when they wake up from their siesta so they can collect their paycheck at the end of the week.
No sig today...
> And yes, we keep up to date, the latest books and fresh articles. ...
>
> did they homework while studying
Frankly, I think most of the problem is that many doctors specialize after graduation, and subsequently lose touch with pharmacological advances in other specialties. I heartily agree with the advice to double-check everything with a pharmacist you trust.
I've also had experience where a doctor was blithely willing to prescribe a(n expensive) medication without asking me what medication I might be taking for a different condition about which I informed him. In my case it just would have caused the medicine he prescribed to have little or no effect, not killed me, however. I.e., wasted money.
No firefox support? What version are you running? We have an installation here -- http://edgecms.edgewood.edu/webapps/login/ -- which is compatible with Firefox. I've taken quizzes on it, downloaded files, read information. I've never uploaded files though. You can access it as a guest if you like. My biggest regret is that Backpack isn't compatible with the Mac. --Sam P.S By the way, I've also used moodle, at a different campus
If you look a the PDF, you'll see repeated reference to a line in KSR v Teleflex, a ruling from just last year: "The combination of familiar elements according to known methods is likely to be obvious when it does no more than yield predictable results." This is entirely common sense, but it wasn't how the Federal Circuit's appeals court saw things when the BB patent was granted, so the patent office didn't have the power to use such logic to make a rejection until KSR v Teleflex. And there are more recent rulings, some already handed down by the Federal Circuit's appeals court and some on the way, further reigning in what is patentable and giving the patent office the power to reject patents like the BB patent.
So the USPTO is (and has been) doing the right thing under the law: when the law was a watered-down mess that said that anything is patentable, they rubber-stamped. Now that the courts are granting them the power to reject again, they're using that power. Expect to see more rejections like this in the near future.