Some information is being passed to me from various community members who have spoken with lawyers and am beginning to get a clearer picture of how the prior art must be framed. Note that this is all generic patent advice so far; I have no information yet about a lawyer’s analysis of Blackboard’s specific patent.There are two basic ways to challenge a patent with prior art. The first one, which is the best way if you can do it, is called anticipation. In order to claim anticipation, you have to show a single prior art reference that discloses all elements (in our case, all 44) of the patent. (There may be some wiggle room if the features are close enough that you can claim “equivalence”, but absent having a lawyer look at the specifics of the case, the safe thing to do is to shoot for 44 out of 44.) I have created a page on the NoEduPatents.org wiki to document examples of prior art that may anticipate the Blackboard Patent.
The second way to challenge the patent would be to claim that the innovation being patented was obvious at the time “to a person with ordinary skill in the art”. The good news is that you can combine multiple pieces of prior art for this argument. The bad news is that it’s harder to prove in court. In the current situation, the best bet for the obviousness argument would be to show that people were already getting the idea of adding education-specific tools (e.g., a grade book, a drop box, a test engine) to pre-existing multi-role, multi-group generic groupware (e.g., Lotus Notes). I have created another wiki page for gathering evidence for this type of argument.
Some information is being passed to me from various community members who have spoken with lawyers and am beginning to get a clearer picture of how the prior art must be framed. Note that this is all generic patent advice…