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: blackboard patent, wikipedia, prior art
As well as looking at prior art that covers the patent just granted to Blackboard, we need to be aware of Blackboard’s other patent claims, and lodge notifications with respective IP organisations.
Blackboard appear to have also lodged patent claims on Learning Objects, educational portals, multi-language LMS systems, and embedded HTML editors.
Check out these blog posts for more information on some of the patents lodged in Australia, and how to notify IP Australia of prior art:
http://blackfate.edublogs.org/2006/08/02/blackboard-patents-in-australia/
http://blackfate.edublogs.org/2006/08/02/informing-ip-australia-of-prior-art/
Let’s get proactive, let’s get smart, and let’s take action.