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Desire2Learn’s challenge of Blackboard’s e-learning patents have resulted in an initial action by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that invalidated all 44 of the Blackboard patents questioned. The action is not final, yet, and both parties have 60 days to respond. But, as eSchool News points out, the ruling raises questions about the validity of e-learning patents:

Blackboard claims that the majority of patents undergoing a reexamination of this kind are ultimately upheld, but D2L’s Baker says that Blackboard seems to be pointing to statistics from ex parte reexaminations, rather than from inter partes patent reexaminations. “The majority of inter partes [reexaminations, which D2L has filed,] have resulted in the patent being fully rejected,” he said.

USPTO figures confirm Baker’s assertion. About a quarter of all ex parte reexaminations result in the original patent being upheld, and 64 percent cause the patent holder to make changes to its patent, according to the federal patent office. Only 10 percent of ex parte actions result in the outright cancellation of a patent. But for inter partes requests, 75 percent of patents are cancelled and only 8 percent are confirmed; the rest are changed by the patent holder.

In the past, I (and others) have been highly critical of Blackboard for cornering the e-learning market by enforcing no-brainer patents where it seems that a vast library of prior works must exist. This not only hinders the development of competitive products, but also provides little incentive for Blackboard to improve their own product. Even the development of innovative uses of Blackboard’s products is discouraged. Following my post that discussed a critical flaw in Blackboard’s SafeAssign product, a leader of a software development company called with news that Blackboard’s lawyers threatened legal action if they were to continue development of a Facebook integration widget.

If Blackboard’s patents are conclusively rejected, the ruling could usher in a new era of innovation in e-learning. This case will be fascinating to follow over the next few months.

The April 2006 issue of Popular Science reports that John Koza’s:

1,000 networked computers don’t just follow a preordained routine. They create, growing new and unexpected designs out of the most basic code. They are computers that innovate, that find solutions not only equal to but better than the best work of expert humans. His “invention machine,” as he likes to call it, has even earned a U.S. patent for developing a system to make factories more efficient, one of the first intellectual-property protections ever granted to a nonhuman designer.

Using evolutionary algorithms, Koza’s machine is able to produce technological improvements without violating patents filed by others. In the near future, this technology may have an impact on creative processes:

The machine has inspired a new way to think about our own creative process: Perhaps extraordinary thinking is simply the product of gradual refinements and serendipitous recombinations. Darwin’s combination of mutation, sex and selection creates not just new species, or antennas: It spawns creativity itself.

Koza’s computers show a promise of contributing to an innovation-based society, but can they outperform humans?