Technology Liberation Front - Latest Comments in Software Patent of the Week: Distance Learning and the Kitchen Sink

Re: Software Patent of the Week: Distance Learning and the Kitchen Sink

Walter_E_Wallis — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:49:47 -0000

I find patentese an abomination. I often tell people it took me 5 years to learn to write like an engineer and 25 years to learn not to.

Re: Software Patent of the Week: Distance Learning and the Kitchen Sink

lewisb — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 07:52:15 -0000

The CS dept here uses Moodle, an open-source competitor to Blackboard, for our course management. The Moodle developers have put up a wiki page listing prior art in this area. As you can see, it stretches back to the sixties.

You might consider letting them know about your projects, Tim. It would certainly benefit them.

Re: Software Patent of the Week: Distance Learning and the Kitchen Sink

Doug Lay — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:43:40 -0000

The Software Freedom Law Center has good timing on this, given the rhetorical butt-whipping the patent system took at the hands of the Supreme Court earlier this week. If this patent is any less obvious than Justice Breyer's raccoon-proof garage-door opener, it ain't by much. The open-source angle is really irrelevant here - for ANY developer of any type, anywhere, to be threatened with this patent is a manifest injustice. Yet thanks to an arrogant bunch of patent lawyers (including the Federal Circuit judges) and an incompetent PTO, patents just like this one abound. Justice Souter worried out loud at the KSR hearing about 100,000 patents being rendered invalid once the Federal Circuit's bad legal standard is invalidated, and the number may not be far off. I hope Souter and other justices have the courage to recognize that justice must trump stability here.

BTW, if anyone wants to eavesdrop on some patent lawyers licking their wounds and basically calling everyone except themselves idiots, check out this comment thread at Patently-O:

http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2006/11/supreme...