e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Author: Michael Feldstein

  • Blackboard, Copyright, and Patents

    Al Essa has a great post up that covers the basic differences between a copyright and a patent as well as laying the groundwork for a dissection of Blackboard’s claims (presumably forthcoming). In the meantime, I am in the process of translating the 44 claims in their patent into plain English. When you see what they are actually claiming to have invented, you will be well and truly gobsmacked. I’ll post it as soon as some colleagues who are smarter than I am have proofread it for me.

  • What You Can Do About DOPA

    I’m going to take a few minutes to switch from the Blackboard patent issue to another legal crisis. Many of you have been hearing about DOPA (The Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006). Its purported intention is to stop online child predators, but what it effectively does is shut down access to any sort of social networking site (which seems to be defined as any site that has some kind of login requirement and allows you to post content) from schools and libraries. It’s so broad that it would filter out even official school web sites with logins. In other words, it’s Bad. You can read the ongoing drumbeat of blog posts on the topic here.

    So what can you do about it? A while back, I promised that I would post some ways in which you can take action to help change our world (or, at least, our laws) for the better. Consider this post to be my first installment on fulfilling that promise. (more…)

  • Taking the Wikipedia Prior Art Effort to the Next Level

    The wikipedia prior art effort has been spectacularly successful so far, racking up close to 200 additions and changes in just a few days. I believe this work has significant intrinsic value in addition to its potential legal value. At any rate, I’d love to see us take our game up another notch.

    Now that many of the basic historic innovations have been documented on the page (not that we should stop doing that), I’d like to see more of the items listed linked to their own Wikipedia entries that provide more detail. If you’re looking for good examples, check out the entries for PLATO and Moodle. If possible–and this is important–they would provide a link to changelogs in the “External Links” section of the entry and/or a narrative summary of the important milestones in the product’s development within the entry itself. We want to make available as much detail as possible about specific developments in each project or product. If you need help reconstructing that information, Scott Leslie recommends using the Wayback Machine to visit an archived copy of Landonline, the precursor to Edutools.

    tags: , ,

  • Is Blackboard Feeling the Heat Already?

    Blackboard has an (apparently) new area on their web site devoted to patent issues, which includes a somewhat defensive FAQ:

    Why has Blackboard developed a patent portfolio?
    We have invested heavily in the research and development of our products (well over $100m). Few other companies have committed such resources to learning technologies designed specifically for educators. Patents help ensure that companies that do not make comparable investments cannot simply rely on copying to develop their products. While we believe that there is a large body of freely available ideas and technology within the industry, we seek to protect our most important technological advances with patents. Globally, we have over 30 patents and patents pending.

    I suspect they’ve received a few calls and emails on the issue.

    tags:

  • Wikipedia Page on History of the VLE Gathers Prior Art Info

    As you may know, patents can be invalidated if one can demonstrate that the claimed invention was in public use or described in a published document prior to the date of the patent filing. This evidence is called “prior art.” A few of us decided that we should begin documenting prior art–not just on the Blackboard patent, but on educational technologies in general. We debated a bit about where to house the effort. I ended up creating a one-sentence stub in wikipedia on Sunday (two days ago). A couple of people mentioned it on a couple of listservs, but we didn’t advertise it widely. And yet, lo and behold, two days later we have a pretty good document that was generated by a variety of people. This morning, a colleague whom I had not spoken to about the page emailed me to point me to it and suggested that I contribute. And tonight, Stephen posted about it, which means the cat is out of the bag for sure.

    The internet is a wonderful thing.

    At any rate, if you have any important data to add to the page about the history of VLE development, please do so. I imagine we will eventually spawn a family of pages about related technologies (whiteboards, LCMS’s, etc.). This would be a Good Thing To Do even if the Blackboard patent fight didn’t exist.

  • Resources on the Patent Issue

    Jim Farmer’s company, instructional media + magic, has archived a wealth of patent-related resources in their eLibrary.

  • College President Fired Because of Blog…Or IS She?!

    Here’s a fascinating story that happened in my own backhard. According to Insider Higher Education, SUNY College of Technology at Alfred President Uma Gupta was forced out, partly due to an anonymous blogger: (more…)