Bloggasm

Gauti Sigthorsson’s Concept Bin points out that Blackboard has successfully patented the combination of a bunch of programs that have already been invented (email, message boards, chat, etc..), and have now issued a law suit against their nearest competitor:

Blackboard, the owner of WebCT, the cumbersome monolith of Learning Management Systems, has been granted a patent on the very idea of merging email, web, chat software and secure hierarchical access into a single enterprise system, for use in training or education. Having been granted the patent in the US, Blackboard promptly sued its rival Desire2Learn, claiming that the latter owes them royalties.

Surprise! Academics, including myself, are furious. ABC News has a good summary of the instant, hostile reaction by the academic community, an extensive Wikipedia entry has been assembled on the prior art of Virtual Learning Environments - arguing that key inventions in the field, including the development of the original Blackboard system at Cornell University, firmly belong to the intellectual commons and have been developed for decades in an environment fostered by public funding.

As Sigthorsson points out, this has caused a backlash against Blackboard, including one University that has stopped using it because of the lawsuit. I used Blackboard when I went to college, and though at first I didn’t like it, I came to eventually use it on a daily basis. In fact, it saved me a few times when there was an assignment due and I had lost my syllabus. But patents like this are incredibly harmful because they block people from doing common sense things, just because they didn’t patent it. If I were to create a site tomorrow that sells both dish rags and computer parts, should I be able to patent the joint sale of dish rags and computer parts so other webmasters can’t do the same thing? Of course not! The case is silly, and I would hope that any professors reading this will immediately stop using Blackboard and switch to their main competitor immediately.

It turns out that McDonald’s has trademarked the “Mc” prefix for any product or organization, and not only sues when a food company uses it (which is reasonable) but when non-food organizations use it as well (complete bullshit).

Malcolm McBratney was a rugby player who used the term “McBrat” on his team shorts, and for some reason McDonald’s decided they needed to sue for trademark infringement. They lost:

AN intellectual property lawyer has won a David and Goliath battle against fast food giant McDonald’s for the right to use the name McBrat on his rugby team’s shorts.

Malcolm McBratney, a partner in Brisbane legal firm McCullough Robertson, said McDonald’s, had been using “bully boy” tactics in seeking to prevent the Brisbane Irish team from using the name “McBrat”.

The ruling was mailed to Mr McBratney by the Australian Trademarks Office in Canberra, following a hearing in April this year when McDonald’s objected to the Brisbane lawyer’s trade mark application.

I understand that companies enforce their trademarks in the fear that they’ll become widely misused if they let a few cases go by unnoticed, but sueing a Rugby team in Australia for using a “Mc” prefix, especially when it’s obviously referencing one of the player’s names? C,mon.

This is nothing I really stopped to consider before. I knew that film-makers who make fictional films have to run the copyright loops from a variety of venues, considering that they’re dealing with things like ad-placement, movie-albums, etc…, but never did I realize that documentarians have to go through these same hurdles. There’s something about this that just makes you want to scream; the fact that those who have enlisted themselves to record history for us in visual form aren’t completely protected by fair-use laws. There’s a Wired article that interviews law professors who wrote a comic book about this subject: Battling the Copyright Monster.

At one point, it begins talking about how copyright has changed over the last 80 years, and how it has actually become an us-versus-them mentality for film-makers:

A fourth thing that cuts the other way is the fear-and-loathing syndrome. There’s a whole generation of filmmakers and digital creators whose only experience of copyright is as a hassle, as an obstruction, as a cease-and-desist letter preventing them from making or distributing their work. They see copyright as a pointless labyrinth they have to make their way through to make their art. We actually view ourselves as copyright defenders, showing how copyright is supposed to work. We’re saying this imbalance could cause us to lose the next generation of artists, if they think of copyright as worthless.

But perhaps the most shocking paragraph in the whole interview was this one:

First of all, documentaries are incredibly important records of our history and culture. They’re visual histories, and they’re increasingly based on copyrighted culture. Our book describes several instances in which the telling of that history has been thwarted by permissions issues. An example is Jon Else having to pay $10,000 for a four-and-a-half-second clip of The Simpsons playing in the background of his film (Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle). The makers of Mad Hot Ballroom had to pay that same amount to EMI because a cell phone rings in the background of one of the scenes, and the ringtone is the theme from Rocky. These examples really resonate with people. They understand that these are instances where copyright is not working the way it’s supposed to.

A massive amount of money for a Rocky ringtone that went off somewhere in the background? For a documentary? Something that usually isn’t expected to make much money anyway?

via IFC

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