[ossig] Open source group wants educational patent reversed - Software - News - ZDNet Asia

[NP Lee]

http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,61971516,00.htm

*Open source group wants educational patent reversed*
By Stephen Shankland 
<mailto:zdnews-asia at cnet.com&Subject=Feedback%20on%20%27Open%20source%20group%20wants%20educational%20patent%20reversed%27>, 
CNET News.com
Friday , December 01 2006 09:12 AM

*A legal center is trying to overturn a patent it says threatens three 
open source educational projects, a sign of the tension between patent 
holders and the collaborative programming community. *

The Software Freedom Law Center said Thursday that it has asked the U.S. 
Patent Office to re-examine a patent awarded to education software 
company Blackboard <http://blackboard.com/>. It claims that the patent 
is bogus and could undermine three open source education software 
projects it represents--Sakai, Moodle and ATutor. The patent, No. 
6,988,138 
<http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=6988138.PN.>, 
is titled "Internet-based education support system and methods" and 
relates to a central feature of Blackboard's software: The ability to 
grant different people, such as students and teachers, different access 
rights to online resources such as grades, files or quizzes.

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"It's a junk patent that should never have been given by the Patent 
Office," said Richard Fontana, a patent attorney with the Software 
Freedom Law Center. And the patent's claims could have an impact on the 
three projects, he said: "They do effectively cover just about any 
e-learning software that is currently in use."

Blackboard, which filed for the patent in 1999 and was awarded it in 
January this year, sees things differently. It sued a proprietary 
software rival, Desire2Learn <http://www.desire2learn.com/>, for 
infringement of the patent, but it isn't going after open source 
projects or educational institutions, said Matthew Small, general 
counsel of the Washington, D.C.-based company.

"It's important to point out this is an isolated suit. It is not the 
first step in a multistep campaign... Our focus is not on open source or 
universities. We want them to sleep easy at night," Small said. 
Blackboard uses and supports open source software, he said.

The disagreement spotlights growing tensions between the open source 
movement, which shares software methods freely, and the proprietary 
realm, where patents and copyrights are used to keep control over 
software. Patents have proved to be a thorny issue in a recent 
partnership between Microsoft and Novell 
<http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,61969250,00.htm> and 
in discussions over a new version of the General Public License. 
Meanwhile, open source allies such as IBM 
<http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,39189229,00.htm> and 
Nokia 
<http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,39232167,00.htm> have 
made various pledges not to sue over patents used in Linux, the 
best-known open source project.

*Re-examination process*
The U.S. Patent Office has three months to decide whether to re-examine 
the patent, Fontana said. During that time, Blackboard may offer its 
opinion and the center may rebut. If, at the end of that period, the 
agency chooses to re-examine it, the discussions will be held between 
just it and Blackboard.

Blackboard is confident the patent is valid, Small said. "We welcome 
another look at the patent. We believe a re-examination will only serve 
to strengthen our patent."

One issue that divides the two sides is the assessment of the patent's 
claims. The Software Freedom Law Center believes the claims "are 
extremely broad," Fontana said. "They're claiming (patent rights to) any 
kind of system in which there are different user roles and different 
file access depending on those roles." But role-based access rules is a 
decades-old technology in the computing industry, he said.

But the center's assessment "is a gross overstatement of what is claimed 
in the patent," Small rebutted. The patent covers the specific situation 
in which a single user has multiple roles. "It used to be that if you 
were an individual in multiple courses--a student in some and a teacher 
in one--you would have a different logon, a different calendar, a 
different environment when you switched from one to other," Small said.

Another difference of opinion is on what sorts of assurances Blackboard 
might provide to open source projects.

The company said it couldn't come to a patent agreement with the 
Software Freedom Law Center because the group was asking for too much. 
It said the company should "give up its rights to enforce not only this 
patent, but any patent we may ever come with in the future for any use 
of open source, whether by commercial or noncommercial" organizations, 
Small said. If Blackboard didn't agree to do so within 10 days, it would 
request the government re-examination, he said.

But Fontana presented a different view. He said the Software Freedom Law 
Center only sought an agreement for Blackboard not to assert current and 
future patents against open source projects, and said an even narrower 
agreement would have been welcome. "If they had offered to provide a 
patent pledge or commitment not to assert this one patent against the 
open source community, that would have been acceptable to our clients," 
Fontana said.

Though the center can't withdraw its re-examination request, there still 
might be room for a separate agreement between the two sides. If 
Blackboard offered a pledge not to assert its patents, that promise 
would likely take the form of other nonassertion policies, such as IBM's 
list of patents it won't assert against open source groups, Small said.

And Fontana said there's still room for discussion. "We are always open 
to further discussions with them."


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