Harold Jarche provides a concise yet powerful defense of the Elgg learning environment against the 44 provisions of the Blackboard LMS Patent in his post Elgg and the LMS Patent. His analysis from a learning professional's viewpoint is critical.
This post is a call to action to any learning professional who wants to preserve open and complete competition amongst vendors (for profit or open source) seeking to assist in the learning process. Please write a post on your blog (feel free to copy this post if you'd like) with a link to Harold's post and create a trackback to it as well.
We all know how Google and the other search engines determine what sites to present first in their listings. Let's make sure that any attorney who searches for information regarding this case finds Harold's post.
technorati tags:blackboard_patent, Elgg, moodle, sakai, desire2learn
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3 comments:
Patents are controlled by a bunch of secretive hobnobs anyways that you have to pay off like a secret society. That is just the way it is.
George Kordonis
Creekwood Consulting
Beverly Hills
This just in from the UK:
Dateline: London, 1 September 2006
William Posters of Stratford-on-Avon was awarded the patent for tragedy, comedy and melodrama on Thursday by the U.S. Patent Office. Claiming to be descended indirectly from William Shakespeare (he has drawn attention to the similarity in their first names), Mr Posters explained that after reading some of his ancestor’s works and realizing that no patent existed for tragedy and comedy, he decided to take the bull by the horns and defend the enormous investment in research and development that his putative great great great great great great great great grandfather Bill Shakespeare had made in developing those two inventions.
After consulting his lawyers, whose research uncovered the little known fact that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “Much Ado about Nothing” and “Romeo and Juliet” contained all the elements of melodrama, Mr Posters included Soap Opera in his claim. This turned out to be a very wise move as there are very few successful writers and producers of tragedy these days and comedy has become so vulgar that no clear relationship exists between what is now called comedy and what W. Shakespeare actually wrote. The last known example appears to be Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Ernest”, now in the public domain. Consequently, claiming royalties on tragedy and comedy would have been futile. But thanks to the careful research of his legal team, Mr Poster’s patent also covers melodrama and specifically Soap Opera, enabling him to claim royalties from a number of schlock production companies and television broadcasters in Los Angeles, California.
Mr Posters stated that he had no intention to deprive television professionals of their revenues relating to their own production costs, but pointed out that his family’s contribution to their profits had never previously been recognized and that it was high time those who made the real sacrifice of exploration, research and prototyping receive their share of the gains. He also regretted the anonymous slander campaign that apparently has been mounted against him by vested interests, who have displayed signs all over Britain calling him a criminal. The usual wording of these signs is “Bill Posters will be prosecuted”. Mr. Poster’s legal team is currently preparing a lawsuit against the purveyors of this hate campaign.
Really useful! I learn a lot from .the above information.
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