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.
I want to run away from their product even if the patents are not invalidated. They're all pieces of crap that rely heavily on Java applets and fail to support updates for browsers when they come out, like Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, etc.
I remember two years ago, there was a period of time where they told users not to upgrade to Firefox 2 or IE7 because they didn't have support lined up for them yet.
I worked with Blackboard for awhile, although not directly for them, and this was mostly attributed to development flat-out refusing to even test compatibility with a beta product (Firefox 3 and IE8 come to mind from recent experience), since they didn't want to have to muck about with the code to get it to work, and then muck about with it even more when a given browser went from Beta to GA. As soon as any beta browser was made GA, development got to work on
I rather hate their stuff as well. Their Java applets tend to crash a few times a week for me. I'm glad when they do, because everything loads considerably faster afterwards. It seems like whatever they have as their failsafe system works far better than their Java implimentation.
Everybody already is running away. Check out the market share numbers- BB is on a serious decline, with most small schools like the one I work for ditching them for almost anything else.
Sadly, we went for Angel, which has been bought out by BB so we need to do another switch. BB will be among the possible options we'll be putting out there for the committee, but given our previous miserable experience with them I'll be amazed if we pick it over either Moodle or Sakai.
If you're seriously considering replacement options, I'm the designer and developer for another LMS that is AICC/SCORM compatible (single-SCO courses at this time) and includes registration and tracking for classroom-based courses in addition to the online stuff. Communication is pretty much one-way though, the students don't have a way to submit materials to instructors. The feature set is purely customer-driven, every feature the LMS has is there because someone asked for it. Anyway, I'm currently adding features to version 7 of the LMS, which I redesigned and rewrote from the previous versions to run on a PHP/MySQL platform and make use of the ExtJS framework for the interface (so it's heavy on Javascript). Our largest client installation has just over 70,000 total users and about 54,000 active students, with 350,000 training records representing 177,000 hours of tracked training. So, if you're in a position to make recommendations, you can find our website at tracorp.com. The website is being redesigned and focuses almost entirely on courseware production as opposed to the LMS software, but you can contact us through the site if you want to schedule an LMS demo.
Second Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do. Really good at convincing the powers that be to buy thier shitware and force it on us yes.
Who says he was joking? There are a lot of people who think patent trolls are actively destroying our economy and that the government can't or won't do anything to protect the population.
I'm pretty neutral on it, honestly. I'm not for vigilantism and its inherent societal breakdown, but I'd have a hard time convicting someone like that guy from Texas [slashdot.org] who's being sued by patent trolls, apparently for no other reason than that he's from Texas, were he to take the law into his own hands.
Maybe Americans should start taking their democratic rights more seriously before blaming "the government" and "the Wall Street executives".
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!!!
I taught a course a while back where I directed students to refer to coursenotes for other courses, written by other lecturers, having made those lecturers aware I was doing so. A week later, nobody had read around the subject using notes from two lecturers in particular. Not being the most forthcoming in terms of volunteering why they hadn't done something, I asked them why, and my students informed me that Blackboard did not allow them to read other lecturers' coursenotes. Because they weren't enrolled on those other courses.
Speaking to the other lecturers, it turns out that it would mean they would have to jump through hoops to allow "non enrolled" students to read those notes via Blackboard. In fact, I myself could not read those notes. So we just enrolled me, and I copied and pasted to my own Intranet pages.
Now, I can imagine why in some situations you might want to "protect" readers or information -- such as in a hospital or a business situation, but this was at a friggin' university, where "reading around" is the lifeblood of learning. Why on earth is it the default to hide coursenotes from students who are not enrolled on a particular course?
Of course, the best bit was that the Unix-based Intranet hosted the best quality notes anyway. Plus, it worked in all browsers.
I also remember a competition to rename "Blackboard". Some of the suggestions were sensible and didn't show much imagination (kinda like Microsoft products): "Chalkboard", "Whiteboard", "Intranet". Others were appropriate, and described the product more fully. However, you wouldn't say them in polite company.
Hell, I've taken blackboard courses where you had to type in a friggin' license number from the back of the $125 paper-back textbook in order to have the "right" to read the "supplementary material" on the publisher's web site (that was required reading). The whole course was bought pre-packaged and plugged in to blackboard. Boy did it suck, too. Can't imagine what the prof in question was getting paid for.
As a Dutch student I have the right to follow any lecture at any university in the country. Due to Blackboard I cannot even access last years lecture notes of my own study, let alone those of any other study. Hell, I can't even look up the schedule.
Perhaps because universities would like to prevent people from auditing courses that they didn't pay for.
Are you kidding me? It's called a "university" for a reason.
As a datum: at the university I attended (which, coincidentally, has produced several of the greatest polymaths in history), once you are at the university, you are permitted -- encouraged, even -- to attend any lecture courses that interest you or may assist you in your studies. (Of course, that doesn't apply to lab experiments or experimental coursework).
If you suggested to someone there that the university should start excluding students from co
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...
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.
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 stun
Which makes me wonder -- why is it that LMSs in general seem to suck so much? I mean, the basic functionality isn't hard; it's the kind of thing that lots of database-driven web apps do. It seems to me that most schools would be better off paying some junior- and senior-level CS students to roll their own than using pretty much any of the prepackaged "solutions," whether proprietary or OSS. Are there hidden complexities that I'm just not seeing? Can anyone who's ever worked on an LMS explain what some o
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.
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.
you may read the appellate court's decision here (PDF) or on scribd.
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.
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
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 stere
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
Patents should protect your exclusive right to produce a device/product/whateverthefucktheyareactuallysupposedtoprotect, not protect your "right" to an entire market.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
for f's sake - can't you actually link to the anti-capitalist post you're criticising? Then I can really slag you off. 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 Bollock
I'm sorry that you guys don't like it...Wanting to make lots of money is at the core of our system. You aren't going to change that.
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 s
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
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.
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.
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.
Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, we did run away and for years my little college has been happily using a competitor's product... Until this last year when Bb bought them out.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
A brief explanation of that behavior, Admodieus:
I worked with Blackboard for awhile, although not directly for them, and this was mostly attributed to development flat-out refusing to even test compatibility with a beta product (Firefox 3 and IE8 come to mind from recent experience), since they didn't want to have to muck about with the code to get it to work, and then muck about with it even more when a given browser went from Beta to GA. As soon as any beta browser was made GA, development got to work on
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, we went for Angel, which has been bought out by BB so we need to do another switch. BB will be among the possible options we'll be putting out there for the committee, but given our previous miserable experience with them I'll be amazed if we pick it over either Moodle or Sakai.
Parent
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:4, Informative)
If you're seriously considering replacement options, I'm the designer and developer for another LMS that is AICC/SCORM compatible (single-SCO courses at this time) and includes registration and tracking for classroom-based courses in addition to the online stuff. Communication is pretty much one-way though, the students don't have a way to submit materials to instructors. The feature set is purely customer-driven, every feature the LMS has is there because someone asked for it. Anyway, I'm currently adding features to version 7 of the LMS, which I redesigned and rewrote from the previous versions to run on a PHP/MySQL platform and make use of the ExtJS framework for the interface (so it's heavy on Javascript). Our largest client installation has just over 70,000 total users and about 54,000 active students, with 350,000 training records representing 177,000 hours of tracked training. So, if you're in a position to make recommendations, you can find our website at tracorp.com. The website is being redesigned and focuses almost entirely on courseware production as opposed to the LMS software, but you can contact us through the site if you want to schedule an LMS demo.
Parent
Re:Blackboard execs should all be killed (Score:5, Funny)
Oh yeah: we're also a small company that has no affiliation at all to Blackboard.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I can recommend Eben Moglen's keynote and the discussion with Matthew Small (2006 Sakai conference).
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Keynote+--+Eben+Moglen [sakaiproject.org]
http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/CONF06/Lunchtime+Discussion+with+Eben+Moglen+and+Matthew+Small [sakaiproject.org]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do.
The above sentence contains two statements. One of these statements is true, and one is false. Please indicate which is which, and submit your answer.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Second Blackboard is a leading industry LMS provider - they are really good at what they do.
Really good at convincing the powers that be to buy thier shitware and force it on us yes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty neutral on it, honestly. I'm not for vigilantism and its inherent societal breakdown, but I'd have a hard time convicting someone like that guy from Texas [slashdot.org] who's being sued by patent trolls, apparently for no other reason than that he's from Texas, were he to take the law into his own hands.
Maybe Americans should start taking their democratic rights more seriously before blaming "the government" and "the Wall Street executives".
I'd say that's exactly what he'd be doing.
Hurry!!! (Score:5, Funny)
Yay. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.
Re:Yay. (Score:5, Interesting)
I taught a course a while back where I directed students to refer to coursenotes for other courses, written by other lecturers, having made those lecturers aware I was doing so. A week later, nobody had read around the subject using notes from two lecturers in particular. Not being the most forthcoming in terms of volunteering why they hadn't done something, I asked them why, and my students informed me that Blackboard did not allow them to read other lecturers' coursenotes. Because they weren't enrolled on those other courses.
Speaking to the other lecturers, it turns out that it would mean they would have to jump through hoops to allow "non enrolled" students to read those notes via Blackboard. In fact, I myself could not read those notes. So we just enrolled me, and I copied and pasted to my own Intranet pages.
Now, I can imagine why in some situations you might want to "protect" readers or information -- such as in a hospital or a business situation, but this was at a friggin' university, where "reading around" is the lifeblood of learning. Why on earth is it the default to hide coursenotes from students who are not enrolled on a particular course?
Of course, the best bit was that the Unix-based Intranet hosted the best quality notes anyway. Plus, it worked in all browsers.
I also remember a competition to rename "Blackboard". Some of the suggestions were sensible and didn't show much imagination (kinda like Microsoft products): "Chalkboard", "Whiteboard", "Intranet". Others were appropriate, and described the product more fully. However, you wouldn't say them in polite company.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell, I've taken blackboard courses where you had to type in a friggin' license number from the back of the $125 paper-back textbook in order to have the "right" to read the "supplementary material" on the publisher's web site (that was required reading). The whole course was bought pre-packaged and plugged in to blackboard. Boy did it suck, too. Can't imagine what the prof in question was getting paid for.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As a Dutch student I have the right to follow any lecture at any university in the country. Due to Blackboard I cannot even access last years lecture notes of my own study, let alone those of any other study. Hell, I can't even look up the schedule.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps because universities would like to prevent people from auditing courses that they didn't pay for.
Are you kidding me? It's called a "university" for a reason.
As a datum: at the university I attended (which, coincidentally, has produced several of the greatest polymaths in history), once you are at the university, you are permitted -- encouraged, even -- to attend any lecture courses that interest you or may assist you in your studies. (Of course, that doesn't apply to lab experiments or experimental coursework).
If you suggested to someone there that the university should start excluding students from co
Moodle? (Score:2)
Hopefully this will kill them, and force TPTB to get something that actually works.
Have you had a look at Moodle [moodle.org]? I came across it the other day when I was evaluating Drupal for my website.
Blackboard's patent (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Outstanding news... so far... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
blackboard is horrible (Score:2)
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 stun
Re: (Score:2)
Just wait until you want to start doing serious Moodle development! It may be better than Bb but it's still awful.
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Which makes me wonder -- why is it that LMSs in general seem to suck so much? I mean, the basic functionality isn't hard; it's the kind of thing that lots of database-driven web apps do. It seems to me that most schools would be better off paying some junior- and senior-level CS students to roll their own than using pretty much any of the prepackaged "solutions," whether proprietary or OSS. Are there hidden complexities that I'm just not seeing? Can anyone who's ever worked on an LMS explain what some o
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Good call (Score:5, Funny)
Somebody tried to patent the blackboard?
Now THERE's a stretch...
Documenting it on swpat.org (Score:2)
If anyone wants to help, I'm documenting this on en.swpat.org/wiki/Blackboard_inc. [swpat.org]
Dead company walking (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Scribd? Gee, thanks. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Their own prior art (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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 stere
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Claims 39-44 enforceable? (Score:2)
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?
Case Study: CUNY 2009 (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [indypendent.org]
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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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.
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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for f's sake - can't you actually link to the anti-capitalist post you're criticising? Then I can really slag you off.
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 Bollock
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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 s
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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
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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.
Re:slashdot anti-capitalists (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.