Blackboard Re-examination

Very cool!! Today, the USPTO ordered a re-examination of the patent awarded to Blackboard for their not-novel Course Management System. Back in November, the Software Freedom Law Center filed a Request for Re-examination with the USPTO. According to the Law Center, "The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC's request raises 'a substantial new question of patentability' regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent." (That's a photo of the USPTO building, courtesy of patrickmmoore)

What does this mean? You never know for sure. The Law Center says that "A re-examination of this type usually takes one or two years to complete. Roughly 70% of re-examinations are successful in having a patent narrowed or completely revoked."

One particular phrase in the re-exam order is particularly telling: "A reasonable examiner would consider the above prior references important in making a decision as to the patentability of claims 1-44 of the Alcorn (Blackboard) patent." (page 4) There's the rub ... are there any reasonable examiners in the USPTO?

Desire2Learn has also filed a request for re-exam, but that might not prove important since the re-exam has already been ordered today. This is definitely not yet a dead issue, but it certainly looks like a step in the right direction. The BlackCt suits must be squirming a bit tonight but I bet the D2L folks will sleep a little more soundly.

My prediction? FWIW (which is nothing, absolutely nothing), I think that the re-exam absolutely will result in throwing out the patent. Blackboard received the patent because the USPTO examiners were asleep at the switch and didn't do their due diligence, and of course Blackboard didn't honestly talk about prior art. If a "reasonable examiner" actually gets involved this time ... it's over for Blackboard.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by...
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving...
Read more

New Netiquette Guidelines for LSC Online

The LSC Online Programs Advisory Committee decided to craft a set of netiquette guidelines that would serve as the recommended list that faculty could use for their online courses. It's not a full policy or anything like that, just an attempt to give them some useful information to post in their online courses. Faculty are free to use them, change them, add to them, not use them at all, or whatever. The list is posted in the LSC wiki . This project was taken on because many of our online faculty had been using a particular web resource for many years as a netiquette guide. That web page began carrying less-than-attractive banner ads and quite frankly was always more about general online netiquette rather than focused on online learning. There are quite a few other sets of guidelines out there, but many of them are rather lengthy or include items that we don't feel are needed, and occasionally we just disagreed with them. So, we decided to write a relatively short list of our ow...
Read more