Freedom in Learning Innovations
I received this from the Masie Center today. I was wary of posting it at first, but I have faith in Elliott Masie, so I’m going forward with posting it, assuming it is legit. If I discover it is incorrect in any way, I’ll amend this post accordingly:
Dear Learning & Training Colleagues:
I am appealing to you for immediate help to stop a disruptive set of lawsuits that threaten the heart and soul of the e-Learning innovation process.
In a nutshell, one small company has applied for and received a number of patents that they claim stake out their ownership of a wide range of the processes underlying e-Learning. For example, they claim to have patented the process of tracking learning based on jobs or test performance. In addition, they claim to own the patents that break documents into learning objects; and even to use one computer to access learning data from another computer via a network.
They have gotten the patents and have filed multi-million dollar suits against several of the e-Learning companies. A few of the e-Learning companies have settled to avoid the huge cost of litigation and the fear of losing in a trial. In conversations with the CEO’s of Learning and Technology companies, it is clear that these lawsuits are going to add increased costs that will be passed along to the customers, as well as have a chilling effect on the e-Learning innovation process.
Continued after the jump.
The letter is continued below:
We MUST join together to overturn these patents by showing them to be false and without basis. The company that is filing these suits is called IpLearn (www.iplearn.com) They are a company with no products and a patent attorney. Iplearn calls their business activity: “intellectualware” They filed their patents between 1996 and 1999.
To overturn these highly questionable patents what the industry needs to do is to gather a full set of “Prior Art” that documents that e-Learning, learning technology, adaptive testing and network based learning pre-dated the papers written by these patent holders.
The MASIE Center is organizing a Freedom of Learning Innovation Project with 2 simple goals:
1) Build a public domain listing of any individuals or companies that have “Prior Art” that can be used to defend against these claims. If you have printed manuals, software or other documentation showing the use of these processes prior to 1996 please contact us. If you were personally involved as a developer, customer or academic with adaptive testing or network based learning prior to 1996, please contact us. We will build a reference list of resources that can be used by any company defending against the IpLearn lawsuits.
2) We want to provide STRONG SUPPORT for e-Learning companies to NOT SETTLE these suits. As customers and users of e-Learning, we do not want our vendors subject to this process of intimidation. There are clear needs for reform of the Patent Process that allows these questionable patents to be granted. But, in the meantime, customers of e-Learning vendors must give them the support and backbone to fight and defend against these suits. Tell your suppliers to join together to fight back!
Please send me an email to emasie@masie.com if you can help in anyway.
Yours in learning,
Elliott Masie
President, The MASIE Center
Founder, The e-Learning CONSORTIUM
www.masie.com
emasie@masie.com
