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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."
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
Well, what you're saying would make sense on the surface, but when you realize how little training doctors are required to have in pharmacology, you'll gain a new appreciation for those pharmacists you just slammed. My father would have been dead several times over if it hadn't been for the pharmacist connecting the dots and realizing one or the other of his physicians had just prescribed a killer combo. That happens more often than you might think, sometimes because of a mistake, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of communication between doctors. Either way, there's a reason that pharmacists study pharmacology. They're more than just robotic pill dispensers.
When your doctor prescribes something for you, go talk to your pharmacist about your entire drug picture before you start swallowing those little pills. That can very well save your life, particularly if you have something like a heart condition.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.