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."

Comments

Get rid of the USPTO

[Yfrwlf]

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.

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[mrbluze]

While this is a non-final action [PDF], which means that Blackboard will be able to appeal, I love how lawyers help lawyers make lawyers more money. I mean, incompetent doctors generate business for incompetent doctors, but lawyers do it with flair!

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[Idiomatick]

Actually incompetent doctors generate business for lawyers too. 'If someone does something, a lawyer profits' - Stella's Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[Yfrwlf]

All 44 patents isn't a small mistake to me. Patents need to be completely eliminated as they only help monopolies price fix whatever they want. I don't believe the world should be restricted for 20-30 years or whatnot while one company controls an idea that a billion others would have thought of, many of which thought of first, around that time period. It greatly slows technological advancements by preventing ideas from reaching everyone quickly and being utilized. Instead, everyone has to live in the dark or have lawyers defend themselves and such. If you eliminate this bureaucratic nonsense then ideas can and will be utilized by everyone quickly. There will still be plenty of incentives for companies to come up with ideas: they want products to sell to make money. Individuals, too, because where there is a problem/need, there are always those who will solve and conquer it. Besides, with the billions of brains on this planet running into problems and thus ways to solve them, do you really think you were ever the first to think of a solution? Chances are pretty damn good you weren't, and if patents didn't exist, the technology would be out much much quicker and would have the chance to benefit everyone, not just the rich or a select few. Not to mention, you would never have companies withholding products just because they compete with their existing products. The patent system has always been a failure, has always kept back technological progress, and will become more and more of a festering wound as the Age of Information Exchange progresses. Any countries that wish to stand up for true marketplace competition needs to ditch it's barbaric artificial restrictions on the sharing and utilization of ideas.

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[pokerdad]

In defense of the USPTO, they did receive over 700,000 patent applications last year.

Do they do such a bad job because they receive so many, or do they receive so many becaue they do a bad job?

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[Yfrwlf]

"In order to get a patent in something, you need to fully disclose how it works and the best way to make and use it."

And these ideas are then actually utilized by using them in products in the world, I'm sure? Oh wait, they aren't, because they're now patented. The real way ideas are shared is to actually use and share them alongside their products, products which will be much more common when there are no restrictions. If patents didn't exist, no one would feel threatened that they might violate a patent, and inventors would be truly free to both invent and then share their product. The entire world (or at leas those countries stupid enough to adopt patent systems) wouldn't be subject to the prices and control of a single company, but could actually utilize and share an idea. Ideas which are going to exist, and will exist more rapidly without a patent system, so that ideas truly get shared. When was the last time you saw a video on YouTube of a patent? Instead it's "Oh, yay, an idea we'll never see or get to use for a few decades because it's been patented so it's completely controlled and restricted by some monopoly." Everyone would "share in the discovery" if they actually had access and could freely share and use ideas without worrying about patents.

"they are there to reward the first person to PUBLISH something"

Their ideas will get out much sooner if they don't have to go ask a lawyer to search for them through the millions of patents to try to determine if their idea is "free" to actually use first. Patents slow the adoption of new ideas and thus slow the advancements that are based on those ideas by preventing them from being placed into the wild quickly. Even if they are found in the wild to a degree, they cannot be improved upon because they are controlled, and they certainly won't be as common as they could be so that they can be utilized properly. Companies can't sit on ideas when those ideas can be actually used by competing companies and placed into products, so companies in the absence of patents will actually want to use ideas and be first to market with them unlike the current system. In other words, as soon as products and inventions aren't controlled by big mega-corps, everyone will be able to create and utilize them, allowing everyone to have them, and making the quality of life better for everyone quickly, in turn allowing for more free time, and more time to find other problems and to come up with ways to solve them. Patents have put many countries of the world at least 30 years behind in technology, but there's no way to know for sure just how bad it has been.

I agree that the Industrial Revolution, for example, was put behind due to patents. Read Against Intellectual Monopoly if you're interested in these and other arguments against patents.

"And at the end of the 20 (21) years, the entirety of your invention is dedicated to the public."

You hit the problem right on the head. Making the world wait around for twenty years on someone's patent that would have and was thought of by a hundred or more others around the time, earlier, or later, slows technological progress and innovation for many of the reasons I've already presented. The problem is you're making them wait for twenty years. What all this comes down to is would problems be solved if patents didn't exist? Yes, I think there's a lot of proof that technology would move much more rapidly. One historical proof of such is how quickly software progress occurred before patents were added to the mix. What's even more amusing is that these patents aren't even used, because so many companies violate so many other companies patents that it's like a cold war in which no one fires on the other because they each have dirt on one another. They do, however, threaten the little software developers who aren't "part" of these big companies.

P

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[ScrewMaster]

For comparison, my profession - Pharmacy - has, at worst, an error rate of 0.0925%. And we handled between 3 and 4 Billion prescriptions.

The difference being the penalties for failure. If a patent examiner "screws up", he just made the USPTO more money in the form of maintenance fees (the fact that entire swaths of technology are illegitimately locked down is irrelevant.)

If a pharmacist screws up ... well. There's a reason your error rates are so low, and I'm damned glad they are: like most people I take a prescription medication now and then. If Pharmacists filled prescriptions they way Patent Examiners issue patents, nobody would ever take a pill.

I say we give a newly-minted Patent Examiner some number of "points" when they start their careers. Every time one of their patents gets invalidated, they lose a point. When they lose all their points, they lose their jobs. Have additional penalties too, for example if you lose more than x points in a year you get passed over for promotions, etc.

Maybe that wouldn't work, I don't know. I can say that there needs to be a structure in place that tends to keep bad patents (and bad examiners) out of the system. As matters stand, the issuing of bad patents is rewarded and the Patent Office is perfectly happy to let the courts sort things out later. That's causing way too many problems to be allowed to continue.

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, there's a big difference between patent claims and patents. This is a single patent with 44 claims. That's a big difference from 44 different patents.

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[Anonymous Coward]

Moving 50 pink pills from the clearly-labeled big bottle into a little bottle and then ringing it up on the cash register is a bit different to reading dozens of pages of lawyer-speak and deciding if it makes sense and if anyone has ever done it before.

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[mOdQuArK!]

If the patent description is hard to understand & difficult to verify its validity, then the default choice should be to NOT grant the patent. Then the patent applicant can fight its way through the court system to show why its patent is non-obvious & has no prior art.

The Mother of all Prior Art ...

[foobsr]

.. 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.

Risk to USERS of open source from patent claims?

[NZheretic]

As I stated over two years ago...

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.

"Prior art" isn't the only problem...

[Joce640k]

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?

That's a joke, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.