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."

Where to Send Your Check

[MichaelCrawford]

You can donate online via Google Checkout, Network for Good or PayPal from the Software Freedom Law Center's donation page [softwarefreedom.org], or mail a check to:

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!

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[Anonymous Coward]

An underlying principle of the patent office is that they trust you. The examiner is not the judge and jury on the validity of a patent, that job is left for a real judge and jury. The job of an examiner is to help you along the process and to try to make sure you don't end up with a worthless patent. If there is anything wrong with your patent, if it is anticipated under 102, or if it is obvious under 103, you can bet that it will come up in litigation. In short, just getting the patent is not the end of the process.

Also, people here always seem to have some sort of anger towards the USPTO, and I don't think that anger is well-founded. Most people don't seem to get the entire point of the patent system: to encourage the exchange of information. In order to get a patent in something, you need to fully disclose how it works and the best way to make and use it. Without a patent system in place, everyone would keep their discoveries as trade secrets and no one would ever publish anything. Even if you don't want to bother to patent an idea you came up with, the patent system encourages you to publish it anyways, to make sure that someone else doesn't later file a patent on it. The end effect, everybody shares their discoveries.

Another common misconception, the patent system is not there to reward the first person to invent something, they are there to reward the first person to PUBLISH something. If you invent X and keep it to yourself, and I later invent X but share how it works, and file a patent, I will get the patent.

So in exchange for fully enabling anyone skilled in the art to make and use your invention, you get a 20 year (or 21 if you filed a provisional application) monopoly. And at the end of the 20 (21) years, the entirety of your invention is dedicated to the public. I do not see a problem with this. You could, however, argue that the patent term is a little long for certain industries (software, cough), where the time to market is so short, and ideas are rarely sat on for 10 years until they become economically feasable.

The "legislative intent" that never was...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

The court's logic was based on flawed logic even back then:
As has now been unearthed [oxfordjournals.org], 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:

a machine or manufacture, which may include anything under the sun that is made by man,...is not necessarily patentable

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[Kiaser Zohsay]

I would think the Mcdonalds court case will have prevented many accidents due to the change in working practice by Mcdonalds.

This change in practice was not due to the court case, this is strictly marketing. McDonald's is trying to compete with Starbuck's by being more "full service". Also note the Iced Coffee available at McDonald's in some regions.

Blackboard was hated before the patent issue

[The Second Horseman]

If you talked to CIOs at schools and IT staff, they've hated Blackboard for years. The software was often junk. Early versions of 6 had significant gradebook problems, and there were a handful of security problems that were just mind-blowing. Of course, they mark their release notes with the list of fixes "proprietary and confidential", which never wins you friends. No, in addition to the scummy salespeople (an especially weasel-like variety) and ridiculous, ever-increasing prices (often mid-year, but late enough to make it hard to jump ship), the support was just terrible. Really, really bad. They didn't really know the software, didn't know the platforms. Expected you to actually build multiple test environments to replicate the problem (if the problem was between even point releases) for them to remotely connect to - they didn't have internal access to test system (this was in the 6.x timeframe). Also, they'd come out with minor (or not-so-minor) releases in mid-semester and tell you that they were required updates to get support. You can't upgrade an LMS in mid-semester at most institutions. Point releases that makes major changes to the database schema and structure are less than attractive, either.

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.

Re:Get rid of the USPTO

[jco]

Pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on MARKETING. And on "licensing" drugs developed by the National Institutes of Health and the universities and teaching hospitals it funds.

Re:Hopefully this means my school will drop softwa

[pedalman]

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"?

Re:That's a joke, right?

[ScrewMaster]

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.