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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."
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
Only a year ago Blackboard wouldn't run without allowing activeX. Dosen't sound like they're much better off now.
Yes. It's fairly prevalent in University of Texas. I use the software to post grades to my students (not by my choice). It's such a pain to upload grades. There's a feature to upload grades from a file, but it requires doing it line by line and requires too many page loads. It's not terrible software; just not that good.
In defense of the USPTO, they did receive over 700,000 patent applications last year. Mistakes are bound to happen be it because of a sneaky attorney or an ill-prepared examiner.
Don't get me wrong, I do believe there are huge problems with the patent system and things need to change (and from the article itself, it looks like a small improvement at least is afoot), but you're statement is the equivalent of saying to a kid "Oh, you missed 1 problem out of 2000 on your test. You obviously don't know math and should never try again."
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
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.
Yes, the University of Newcastle (Australia) uses it (I'm a student there).
By the look of my Uni's website, it hasn't been updated since 2003. I don't know if there are security issues with this, or perhaps it's just that the copyright notice hasn't been updated with version updates.
In any case, my Uni uses it for classes. Lecturers upload all their lecture slides, tutorial questions, etc. onto the course's Blackboard section, our grades are given on Blackboard, staff make announcements for their course, there's a discussion board with a really annoying interface and a chat feature. I'm missing a few other things as well.
The user interface is probably about as hostile as it gets. I can't help but feel that whoever designed the thing actually wanted the students to feel like they've been trapped with the typical web design of the mid-90s.
I have Apache and MySQL installed on my home computer, and I installed Moodle to take a look at it. While I can't compare the staff's interface to the system as I've never used Blackboard's, it was certainly a beautiful system to use, staff members could customise the front page for their course, uploading resources was a breeze, as was adding things to the calender, etc.
The interface from the student's POV was equally as good - things are organised on a week-by-week basis (According to the discretion of the course coordinator), and so grabbing the lecture notes for the current week (Or for any week) is easy straight from the front page, announcements and new forum posts are easily seen...it seems to have been designed by people who actually care about their students and the time that they will spend using the thing. It's not so much a site for staff to post lecture slides, but more of a place online where students can (And are encouraged) to visit and chat and collaborate constructively with their peers...it's a breath of fresh air after such a long time using a stagnant system like Blackboard.
Sorry for the offtopic. Basically, I hope Blackboard goes down so that my Uni and others can consider viable alternatives.
That too, and what's more, the threat that companies use towards others when they get these patents often means they get their way. Since the official "way to challenge patents" means hiring a lawyer, I'm sure it puts off most businesses, meaning the only successful ones are often those with the deepest pockets. The whole thing is designed to make the rich richer, like so many other things in the world today. Patents end up being gobbled up by monopolies any way, and then defined with their bottomless pockets, so the net effect is always less competition. It's sad when artificial restrictions set up "by citizens" end up hurting them, and everyone continues to let it happen. If consumers only realized how much richer their lives would be if their governments stood up for competition in every marketplace, or at least didn't impose rules which create and help monopolies, I swear there would be riots.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
700,000 isn't so bad.
/. articles, a huge error rate. If a patent examiner screws up on one patent, that's about an 8% error rate for him. For comparison, my profession - Pharmacy - has, at worst, an error rate of 0.0925%. And we handled between 3 and 4 Billion prescriptions.
700,000 / 52 = about 13.5K per week.
Give that they have 5,477 patent examiners, that is a rate of about 2.5 patents per examiner per week.
There seems to be, based off of
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.
Gradebook is a NIGHTMARE. I mistyped one of the calcs (23 instead 32 percent) and didn't catch it until after midterm, and when I went to reset it, it blew the grades to pieces. It was for a HUGE class (150 students) and so I had to re-grade and personally re-calc 150 grades (midterm, paper, final exam). I used Excel to help, but I HATE EXCEL and it wasn't fun having to deal with something that should not have been hard to re-finagle easily. Total nightmare.
I am hoping this ruling will lead to better software for me. As it is, avoid BB like the plague...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Well, if the law uses a normal word, maybe you people in the patent industry ought to interpret the law the way it is written.