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Blackboard Patent Invalidated By Appellate Court
Arguendo writes "A federal appeals court ruled Monday that Blackboard Inc.'s patent on a learning management system is invalid in light of the inventors' own prior software product. We have previously discussed the patent and Blackboard's trial court victory against Desire2Learn. It's not completely over, but this is almost certainly the death knell for Blackboard's patent. If so inclined, you may read the appellate court's decision here (PDF) or on scribd."
Well.. Actually... This will have little bearing on overall patent trolling and issues. But at least there's a court out there that's paying attention.
Desire2pwn
Along with the patent examiners, of course.
If you look at the patents that Blackboard has, they basically make it *impossible* to have any kind of "intranet" site at an educational institution. Everything (almost literally everything) that you would want to have/do on a school's intranet, Blackboard has a patent for.
It's fucking ridiculous, and if their patents are invalidated, everyone in the education industry will RUN AWAY from their product, which sucks.
Quick, post your comments on slashdot before Blackboard patents a method for providing an interface that allows snarky and/or sarcastic comments to forum posts!!!
Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are...
lol.
Summation 2
Because, as most /. readers tend to believe, "information wants to be free", and the Blackboad patent was so directly a contravention of that idea that even their own case filings ignored the idea of courseware to focus on a single aspect -- allowing a student who is also a teacher in another role -- to use one login. Then they used a faulty decision in that court to target their competitor -- who made no infringing claim.
The appeal judges state "On the merits, we hold that those claims do not contain a âoesingle loginâ limitation and that the district courtâ(TM)s contrary interpretation of the claim language in its JMOL ruling was error" (I think they meant "erroneous").
The problem is later where the Appeals court did not consider whether or note Blackboard's patent was wholely discardable because they did NOT rule as to whether or not the single login multiple role functionality is OBVIOUS or not.
Prior art anyone?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
As a student, Blackboard is the biggest pile of crap! Everybody at the university hates it, including all staff. Maybe the court will just burn the code for no reason.
The fact that anyone pays to use their software saddens me. It's absolutely awful. They're making a killing too. It's becoming the standard educational institution package, mostly because all the other universities use it. Their "clustering" solution is an absolute joke. They just recently started supporting 64-bit jvm's. That means that until recently if you wanted to scale, you had to launch multiple 1GB VM's and load balance requests yourself. The frequency, severity and apathy of the bugs is stunning. I personally don't have the capacity for hate that this "software" deserves. It's an absolute turd.
I'm sorry that you guys don't like it, but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
As a capitalist, I wholeheartedly agree. As a citizen, I disagree with the government's grant of exclusive rights on something as nebulous as a software algorithm (as opposed to a specific implementation of that algorithm). Make money off your ideas all you want. I do! Just don't expect to make money of the sole act of having thought them.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Patents should protect your exclusive right to produce a device/product/whateverthefucktheyareactuallysupposedtoprotect, not protect your "right" to an entire market.
You mad
I have no problem with people making money. When they try to make money with ideas that aren't theirs, or ideas that are so ridiculously obvious or broad, then I have a problem.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Every time there's a patent article on slashdot, the summary and comments all just ooze with thinly-veiled contempt for our free market system.
In what way are government-granted monopolies considered a "free market"? It seems kinda like the opposite.
it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
An if you're actually competent, you can do that without crippling all your potential competitors and causing net harm to the economy.
Somebody tried to patent the blackboard?
Now THERE's a stretch...
If anyone wants to help, I'm documenting this on en.swpat.org/wiki/Blackboard_inc.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
I'm probably one of the most capitalist people you will ever meet, but patents != free market capitalism. Lets see, the government is giving a monopoly to a product. Thats not very capitalist. Patents are not free market capitalism.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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You know when some company with a totally crap product starts looking at their patent portfolio for survival...you know, like SCO...that they don't have much going for them. Instead of putting that time and money into making their products better, they put their best efforts into litigation. You know that's a red flag for any company.
Can we please trade eastern district of Texas back to Mexico? That court is a plague on business and an anchor on innovation.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Or if scribd is insufficiently annoying, we can print it out with an old 40 chars-per-line dot matrix, onto toasted wholemeal bread. We can then supply a strong lamp, a pen, and some blank bread for use as notepaper whilst you attempt to decipher it.
When they try to make money with ideas that aren't theirs, or ideas that are so ridiculously obvious or broad, then I have a problem.
I have no problem with someone trying to make money with an idea that isn't theirs. If they make a better mousetrap, even if they didn't think of it, they should be able to profit off that. Also, if someone can find a good way to make money even off obvious ideas, I'm all for that too. It's when they try to do things in the court system with no intention of actually producing anything that I have issues.
I'm sorry that you guys don't like it, but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas. Wanting to make lots of money is at the core of our system. You aren't going to change that.
You are kidding right. Do you really think someone who is intellectually honest, and it isn't biased, and with two fingers of intelligence will agree with something like this:
A system and methods for implementing education online by providing institutions with the means for allowing the creation of courses to be taken by students online, the courses including assignments, announcements, course materials, chat and whiteboard facilities, and the like, all of which are...
You are kidding right. Do you know how vague this "idea" is, and how many possibilities it range? Do you really think this is an original idea, or the natural way technology evolve. Maybe they can also patent networks on the moon since we probably are going there and will need networks.
OK - first ignore (for a moment) your hate of patents, copyright, etc.
Now ignore the othe companies prior art.
My question: Blackboard created (in 1999) some software and then later merged that company (their original company) into blackboard (seems like they just wanted to incorporate with a better name) and absorbed the patents. Given the patents are now owned by blackboard - I don't understand how their own prior art could invalidate them? Couldn't they sue based on that prior art? This one eludes me.
I do not support "The Man". I also do not support your irrational stupidity
As a prof, I hate blackboard. It is the buggiest, stupidest, slowest education software I have ever had the misfortune to use.
Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.
Have you had a look at Moodle? I came across it the other day when I was evaluating Drupal for my website.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
for f's sake - can't you actually link to the anti-capitalist post you're criticising? Then I can really slag you off. /., and I know I speak for no one here, we believe not in anti-capitalism, but in *social democracy* - in other words, "please f**k off and stop bullying me you bastards" - and if you are going to do it, don't do it anonymously ... unless you're from /b/
Also, try to not post with AC if you're posting obvious flamebait - it makes it a lot harder for us sane people to hunt you down and overload you with derision each time you post ever again.
So, 'free market' is a pretty basic description of the s**t hole we are living in - you make it sound like cartels and "big government" don't exist --- but they do.
Where's the supply and demand in Bollockboard's case either? They held the license and refused to supply the IP to anyone at a reasonable price and indeed their patent was bollocks too. Sounds like a bunch of c**p; and this is the system you hold so dear.
basically it is NOT ok to make money off of IDEAS - it's only ok to make money off good implementations of ideas... otherwise my idea for a web based message board full of porn would be earning me millions...
here on
I'm sorry, but it's absolutely not, and you're quite socially impaired for allowing yourself to believe it. Capitalism and corporations, whatever they have grown into, were created to boost SOCIETAL improvements. Do you really think society sat down and thought, "OK, we want John to be much richer than Sarah"? No amount of posting that it's OK will help you to justify your sociopathic beliefs, because they're unjustifiable. If you want peace of mind, then mature, consider the ethics of society and the common good, and act in accordance.
Every time there's a patent article on slashdot, the summary and comments all just ooze with thinly-veiled contempt for our free market system.
I'm strongly pro free market and I still can't see how this patent supports a fully functional and free market. I understand that some monopolies may be neccessary in order to provide incentives for what society needs, but this... What did they invent? It is a serious question: What did the come up with? I read through their patent application and I still don't know.
Patents are meant to benefit society by spreading the knowledge of how the protected innovation functions. In return the patent holders get a temporary monopoly. This type of application helps nobody but the patent owners and gives nothing back to society.
On the other hand:
I have a lot of respect for "the RSA guys" for example. Highly professional mathematicians who engage in a difficult task for years and finally come up with a fully functional solution to one of societys problems. People like that truly advance our society and this type of effort should be rewarded somehow, perhaps with a commercial monopoly. That is one of a very limited set of software/algorithm patents that I would approve of myself (not in that line of business though).
Monopolies should only be granted to truly great innovations. I realize that there is a hughe amount of work put into Blackboards system, but when it comes to actual innovations... What where they again?
[English is not my native language and I'm jet-lagged. Leave the spelling issues to some other day.]
They still have claims 39-44 and those are enforceable? What! Those are dependent claims. You break the parent and the dependent ones fall apart. At least that's what I was always told. Am I wrong on that or do they just want to keep hope alive?
it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas
It's okay for people to want to make money off just about anything, including sitting on their asses all day reading /.
However, We The People are not obligated to provide them with legal avenues for doing so.
In the specific case of "making money off ideas" -- no. Ideas are cheap. I have ideas all the time. Most of them are clearly silly and impractical, some of them seem to make some sense, and a few would probably be useful (and lucrative) if I put the time and effort into developing them. But making them from a passing thought into an actual product takes a hell of a lot of work. Until I've shown that I am willing and able to do that work, I really don't have the right to tell anyone else that their similar ideas, and work to turn those ideas into something valuable in the real world, are off-limits. Or rather, I have the right to tell them that, but they are under no obligation to listen, and neither are the courts.
The claim that ideas alone are of such sacred value that they must be carefully protected from the moment of their inception is a deeply pernicious one, which has done enormous damage to our economy and society. "Capitalists" who insist that the law interfere with the free market in such a manner are making a mockery of the principles they claim to hold.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The problem with this, in principle, is that it takes a lot of time and money to come up with, and design a mousetrap. If they build a completely different device for catching/killing mice, then I agree with you. If they take your device, rebrand it, and sell it, then there is a problem. If they take your device and change it only marginally, then there is a problem.
I think the drug company idea is a better example. It costs many millions of dollars to develop a new drug, put it through trials, get it approved by the FDA, etc. There would be no incentive to do R&D if the next person could simply copy the formula, or make a simple change like give it a candy coating. In this case, and what I hope you're referring to, is the idea that a drug company patents "Curing AIDS". An overly broad, non-specific implementation, wherein, if another company comes up with a completely different way to cure AIDS, they shouldn't be blocked from producing and selling it.*
*This is an analogy. Analogies aren't perfect. Please refrain from debating the specific merits and ethics of patenting drugs. (Social benefits, withholding health, etc.)
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Seconded. The problem with patents is not their exclusivity. It's not the people get to make money from their ideas. The problem is that people get exclusive rights to make money off commonplace ideas that anyone faced with the problem would think of. This should not happen. Patents are allegedly only available for novel and non-obvious inventions. The problem is that obvious inventions are being granted patents.
Consider this headline: "Blackboard Breakdown: CUNY in a 'Very Difficult Box to Get Out of' After Online Centralization Plan Backfires". (CUNY, City University of New York, third-largest university system in the US, 21 campuses).
"Blackboard 8 had never been used at a university close to the size of CUNY, where it has 130,000 users including 8,000 faculty members. When the semester started, Blackboard buckled under the load, which peaked at 35,000 users every three hours during peak activity. Sporadic Blackboard service during the first weeks of the semester meant many students could not submit their assignments, take quizzes or stay in contact with their instructors."
http://www.indypendent.org/2009/06/12/blackboard_breakdown/
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Drug companies are a great example, and how patents should work. If it costs you half a billion dollars to bring the next wonder drug to market, we as a society have a vested interest in you making more than half a billion dollars back. We want you to be profitable, because we want you (and people like you) to keep producing wonder drugs. We provide legal protection to make you money because we want to provide you with an incentive to invest time and money.
The parasitic case that gets everyone's back up is when some guy gets a simple idea, often one that either 1,000 people already had and didn't patent because it was trivial and not patent worthy, and patents it. There is no societal benefit to giving a pot of gold to the first person to think of something when -anyone- faced with the same problem would design a substantially similar solution at a cost of next to nothing. Beneficial things that cost nearly nothing to think up will continue to be produced because they're part of doing your job or running your business.
There is more to auditing than reading the course notes. Things like attending labs and lectures, and getting credit for the audit on the transcripts. Some courses legitimately hide course material from the general public, usually professional courses. But the default should not be to hid the course notes. This is the reason that I do not use the blackboard product at my institution for my classes. I have just used a regular website. Our faculty is moving to moodle this year, so we will see how that goes.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas.
Yes, but it is NOT OK for people to want to make money off other people's ideas. And that is why the Slashdot community is so sour on companies like Blackboard.
It's people like you and companies like Blackboard that are "anti-capitalist".
The sad fact is that patents have become such a big industry of their own, and the effect of a patent is no longer the rights provided by the patent itself, instead it's true power is its means of unleashing prohibitively expensive legal pressure upon others.
Multi-billion dollar corporations stand to lose millions on a product they market to the entire country due to an upstart company serving a smaller region. The larger company has nothing to lose by spending millions arguing a stretched scope of the patent causing the smaller company to spend millions on defense, or else lose millions due to false patent violations. Larger corporations also have nothing to lose by monopolizing the patent office with as many superfluous patent applications as they can dream up, making it more difficult and costly for smaller companies to obtain protection from their legal department.
If a patent holder had to demonstrate a concerted effort to bring a patented product or process to market within five years or face massive fines proportional to the patent holder's net worth, things would be a lot different. Unfortunately, corporate-funded lobbyists would never let that happen.
War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
Can we please tone down the anti-capitalist rhetoric on slashdot? Every time there's a patent article on slashdot, the summary and comments all just ooze with thinly-veiled contempt for our free market system.
I'm sorry that you guys don't like it, but it's OK for people to want to make money off their ideas. Wanting to make lots of money is at the core of our system. You aren't going to change that.
I fully endorse our free market system, but, what BB has done is simply absurd. I previously maintained an online learning management system which at the time was in danger of being sued by BB for simply being a tool to manage distance learning. BB got away with the equivalent of Amazon selling books online. Getting a patent on selling a type of item over the internet would be absurd. Having a patent for something as generic as online learning is ridiculous.
The real problem is that the US patent system is anti-capitalist. It's way too easy to get a bullshit patent where there's clearly prior art or the so-called innovation is entirely trivial. This allows any fool who can afford a patent layer to amass a portfolio of bullshit patents. Once the patents have been issued, they're valid US patents, and the owner of the patents can use them to get an injunction to block competition. In order to get the patent overturned, the competitor will need to go to court and spend millions in legal fees and endure a long, slow trial process that will take at least a year (Blackboard won the initial suit back in February of 2008). To make matters worse, the competitor is blocked from the market until the trial process is over. As a result, the patent system actually stifles innovation. This is especially true in markets involving emerging technology where most patent examiners have no clue as to what's actually a novel idea, and the nascent market is too small to justify the legal fees to overturn the patent.
or we could subsidize the development of said drugs and really employ the public benefit by thereafter making them free......Oh wait, we already do the former!
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Pfff.. You think there's much anti-capitalism? No there isn't. Not even enough of it.
We're soaking in capitalism and marketing and shit every day, here on slashdot and most everywhere else. Freemarketism is the fucking baseline of human culture in the west.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
No, that's fine, thank you. ScribD IS sufficiently annoying.
Can someone remind me why those kind of sites which gather docs and make then absolutely unreadable exist?
Patents like this are anti-capitalist. 'A learning management system that allows a single user login to have multiple roles'. Great invention. Slap a patent on it, gotta protect that ambition to invent!
I'm sorry I think people have a right to their (non-trivial) ideas. Prior art establishes this nicely. Since practically all rock stupid ideas have been thought of already. So no one can copyright 'a flat surface conducive to writing' but if someone produces a mathematical method to determine if a number is prime (instantly) that deserves a copyright.
So no one can copyright 'a flat surface conducive to writing' but if someone produces a mathematical method to determine if a number is prime (instantly) that deserves a copyright.
I'm sorry, but you're talking out your ass. The whole goal of patents and copyrights is to benefit society by virtue of granting a little incentive for inventors to publish their findings. I'm glad that Leibniz and Newton didn't patent their methods for computing the rate of change of motion, or we'd be having this conversation via quill-pen-on-parchment tied to carrier pigeons.
I'll simplify this since it seems to be above you: you can't patent math, nor should you. Algorithms are math. Combining algorithms yields an algorithm. Ergo, algorithms should be unpatentable, regardless of cleverness or novelty. To say otherwise is to display an astounding ignorance of several hundred years of patent law and societal ramifications.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yes slashdot is anti-capitalist to some degree. Slashdot users are in general pretty interested in freedom issues. You'll find a pretty big support for the free market, but far less support for some of the capitalistic ideas that aren't based around the free market. Intellectual property being an example of that.
The best argument for copyright and patents is basically that atleast it should ensure that stuff is invented and created, however costly it is to society otherwise. But when you see the current capitalistic exploitations going on, even that argument starts to lose its colors. And you are basically left with the argument that it is capitalistic to assign ownership to everything. An arugment that simply isn't productive nor seen as inherently true by those who use their brains.
I do find slashdotters resistance to specifically software patents somewhat telling though. Software patents aren't really special. They just affect most people here directly. You can't get anything done if you have to watch out for patent mindfields? Well, that is exactly how people feel in other fields also. Reality is colored by your point of view.
Or if scribd is insufficiently annoying, we can print it out with an old 40 chars-per-line dot matrix, onto toasted wholemeal bread. We can then supply a strong lamp, a pen, and some blank bread for use as notepaper whilst you attempt to decipher it.
I don't know why this is moderated "Funny" -- it's one of the most "Insightful" posts I've read on /. today.
Scribd is complete slow, buggy, poorly-thought-out garbage.
Pirate Party UK
And the distinction between those two things is....?
May the Maths Be with you!
Copyright....patent....not the same...ah, feel the ignorance. It's like the sweet smell of warm piss.
I sincerely hope this decision gets us a little closer to having a real alternative to Bb, because paying them to "develop" such a inadequate CMS just feels a lot like highway robbery
PS Bb on commodity 1u servers running Centos 5.3 is WAY faster than on Solaris 10 boxes. We still use Solaris for the Oracle backend but the performance under linux just beat the pants off slowlaris (hate to say it cause I'm a solaris guy)
If you can get a US Patent for this....
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/srchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,368,227.PN.&OS=PN/6,368,227&RS=PN/6,368,227
I am not so very impressed....
Now lets roll out some competition, so that those assholes at Blackboard can stop coding like they're blindfolded...
Scribd is complete slow, buggy, poorly-thought-out garbage.
Oh shit. Blackboard's gonna sue THEM next.
Which very quickly becomes a question of which is a better engine for innovation: private industry or government?
The profit motive, however much it offends some purists's instincts, works. Drug companies will create the drugs that make a lot of money. Why do they make a lot of money? Because a lot of people want them, implying they treat a condition that a lot of people have, and because people are willing to pay a lot of money for them, meaning they're for a condition people really want treated. Capitalism selects the problems we really care about. Government is vulnerable to special interests, lobbyists, and public demonstrations.
You will be assimilated.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Drug companies are a great example, and how patents should work. If it costs you half a billion dollars to bring the next wonder drug to market, we as a society have a vested interest in you making more than half a billion dollars back. We want you to be profitable, because we want you (and people like you) to keep producing wonder drugs. We provide legal protection to make you money because we want to provide you with an incentive to invest time and money.
What is the point if we as a society (ie almost everyone) can't afford the damn drug because to recoupe that money quickly they've made the price ridiculous???
This is a classic example of something that SHOULD be regulated. The drug company should not be permitted to lock the drug up or effectively lock it up by making the price unaffordable. But we STILL need to find a way to reward and compensate the company.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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