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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.
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...
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
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...
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.
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
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'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.
I'm not any kind of patent expert or anything like that, so take this guesswork with a few thousand grains of salt.
I believe that prior art has to be listed for a variety of reasons. I'm pretty sure that one of them is to limit the scope and duration of that portion of any new patent that includes that same (?) feature. To not list prior art that they themselves own is kind of like trying to get a free (and faudulent) extension to the previous patent.
(Kind of like expecting the warranty on your old stereo to be fully renewed because you bought a new knob for it.)
Also, I've seen articles about several patents that just don't have enough substance to qualify for a patent after removing stuff covered by prior art. In which case, not listing your own prior art can be an attempt at getting a patent for something that doesn't qualify.
A third possible reason why not listing your own prior art can be a legal or proceedural problem. That prior art may have it's own licensing or other IP agreements or issues, but if a new patent covers that same functionality without excluding it via prior art you're probably looking at a number of possible fraudulent lawsuits.
(We already licensed patent zyy, and now they want us to pay again because it also violates patent zzx...)
I'm sure you can see how patent trolls and other patent lowlifes can really abuse this.
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.
Prior art is not "somebody patented it already". Prior art is "somebody published it already".
If I publish a description of a new invention, then five years later decide I'd like to patent it because it's making money, I'm too late. My own published description from five years previously is prior art.
So Blackboard publish software embodying an "invention". Several years later they patent that "invention". The original software is prior art and invalidates the patent.
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.
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.
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
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.
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)