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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."
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.
Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
This does not qualify as patent trolling. Patent trolling is making/buying a patent that has no actual product behind it (or never making use of the product) and then hanging out hoping others would make a similar product and then sueing for profit. Blackberry has been using their product for years now and they are an industry leader in LMS technology.
Blackboard's "patents" are all based on prior art. Blackboard is nothing more than a database driven web site, and adds nothing novel or non-obvious. Most of their features exist in your basic blog sites. They are as much patent trolls as Amazon was for 1-click shopping.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
It's not all that difficult to set up a system where you log in, click on a course to launch it, and the course communicates with the LMS. That's only one small part of the LMS though, there are a lot of managerial things to set up also.
I've worked for the same company for the past 7 years, the core business of the company is producing online training courses but when I started we did have an LMS also that we built. At the time it was on version 5, and had started as a research project for Intel in 1998. It was written in ASP/VBScript, and used a SQL Server database. Through 5 versions it had never had a formal design document, every single feature was just added in somewhere when a customer asked for it. One of my first big LMS projects here was working on version 6, which was the first version to support SCORM in addition to AICC. After a while I finally got my boss to agree to let me redesign and rewrite the LMS from the ground up, and we finally got a customer who was willing to help fund it. So, about 3000 man-hours later, we've got version 7 (7.1.8 at this point) which runs on PHP/MySQL and uses the ExtJS framework for the interface, which I actually did create a design document and database structure for before beginning development.
The course launching and tracking parts didn't take that long to develop. SCORM takes a little while to set up, but AICC is pretty quick. But logging into the main admin area gives you a menu with these items:
Users - see all users (students, instructors, user group admins, sub-admins, main admins), add/edit/delete users, assign users to content, assign users to user groups.
Registration fields - custom user demographic fields, 30 total, each can be a text field, number field, date field, or dropdown list, with basic validation and various options for whether the students can fill them out or change them, only admins can, if they can be used to sort in the user list, etc.
User Groups - users are divided into groups, each user can be a member of 0 or more groups, groups are nested in a tree structure, you can manually assign users or user group admins to a group, specify which content or content groups a user group has access to, specify rules to automatically assign users to groups based on the custom registration fields. Autoassignments are a big part, if you have a user register and they put in maybe a certain country for one of their fields, you can set up a rule to automatically assign them to a certain user group that gives them access to certain content without the admin needing to assign it to them manually.
Content - add/edit/remove online training, online tests (the LMS has a test creator for creating T/F, multiple choice, or essay tests), classroom training, or other online resources. Content is grouped into categories in a folder structure, there are various "wizards" to upload or edit the content.
Content groups - similar content can be grouped together, making it easier to assign entire courses of study to a user or user group.
Classrooms - set up physical locations for classroom training.
Classroom sessions - set up a session for a certain classroom course to be taught at a certain location with a certain instructor at a certain date/time. Students can register for and drop out of class sessions, emails get sent to give them information about the waiting list, location, etc.
Record Entry - admins can manually enter training records for students.
News & Updates - admins can set up news stories announcing new courses or whatever, news stories can apply to user groups so that when a user logs in they see news from their groups.
Reports - many, many reports for the admins.
General settings - various options, split up into 6 categories (Login, Passwords, Users, Email, General Admin, User Group Admin).
Admin Tools - "advanced" tools to do things like upload LMS interface graphics, check on what a user has access to and how they got access to it, delete records, etc.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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)