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

Is the tide turning?

[Anonymous Coward]

The pressure has built for years. Nobody ever liked software or business patents. It all started with a court case that opened the gates and once that happened an arms race ensued. The very idea is absurd, and a whole industry with many reputations and careers has been built on defending the ridiculous during the last few years.

I found these remarks in the comments of TFA very interesting, and I assume they are genuine.

I head the group that runs Blackboard at our university and we are very happy, as an institution....Personally, I have a number of friends at Blackboard; I like them very much and I think they are good people, but I am glad to see news that the Blackboard patent claims will/might soon be invalidated. I am of the opinion that Blackboard should have never embarked into this nonsense, into this unnecessary e-Learning industry distraction, and that whatever money Blackboard would make out of it, if any, it would never amount to the costs and PR damage that they have inflicted on themselves. Blackboard has excellent technology, products and services. They should continue to compete and keep/attract customers on that, and not on wasting their/our time and resources filing patents and lawsuits. Hopefully, this will be the beginning of the end of this nonsense.

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.

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[WedgeTalon]

700,000 isn't so bad.

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 /. 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.