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Education Patents Your Rights Online

Online Testing Patented 48

Posted by timothy from the mmm-obviousness dept.
An anonymous reader writes "For those who think that online testing is an obvious idea, please be advised that the USPTO recently issued U.S. Patent No. 6,513,042 for online testing to two Ohio inventors. According to an article in NEOhio CrainTech, "As of last week, Test Central Inc. in Cleveland owns the U.S. patent to conduct testing via the Internet and, in essence, owns the online testing business.""
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Online Testing Patented More

Online Testing Patented

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  • looks like you can patent anything these days (Score:3, Funny)

    by ibbie ( 647332 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @09:35AM (#5222223) Journal
    *runs and patents slashdot trolling before it's too late*

  • Higher Learning (Score:3, Interesting)

    by g(zerofunk.org) ( 596290 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @09:36AM (#5222234) Homepage
    It will be interesting to see what this does for Colleges and Universities, at the university I attended they were pushing for 50% of all classes to be offered online by 2010. This included quizzes and tests.
    g

  • I'd like to patent... (Score:3, Funny)

    by MacAndrew ( 463832 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @09:42AM (#5222277) Homepage
    I'd like to patent online cheating. Licenses will come dear.

    I used to wonder if my professors could be replaced by a VCR, perhaps even year to year with material that hasn't changed. But at some point the learning experience must be compromised, however great the financial savings.

    Regardless ... this sounds as bright as the one-click purchase patent. Can't these people just compete on quality of service?
    • Can't these people just compete on quality of service?
      What, and get their hands dirty??? Seriously, I don't think they even know the meaning of quality of service.
  • Avoid USA jurisdiction regarding servers, clients and networks, and you're done. oo Either if you do bussiness with it, or just do it (online testing) for fun, no one can prevent you from testing online outside that country. oo
    • Right, and the US _never_ enforces its own laws in foreign countries...
      • What do you mean? Of course it does! But regarding patent issues, things are not that easy for them. Software patents for instance, "bussiness practices" patents too, neither can be enforced in my country. Now, from the copyright law front, DMCA like laws are being passed everywhere, including my country. If we didn't please the USA government with the approval of the law, we would have sufferd commercial sanctions. Sigh.

  • Breadth: Doesn't cover all online tests (Score:5, Informative)

    by DeadSea ( 69598 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @10:02AM (#5222402) Homepage Journal
    The patent does not cover all online tests. There are numerous ways to avoid infringing on this patent.

    In claim 1:

    wherein a test-taker is required to pay to take the compiled test;
    If there is no money involved you do not violate this patent. If you pay for a course and take a test as part of that course there are other ways around it

    In claim 13:

    wherein a test-maker and a proprietor of the first computer share the revenues generated by the test-taker taking the test.
    There must be at least two parties making money of the testing. The first being the test maker and the second being the person who owns testing computer. If you make your own tests and host the tests on your own computer, you do not infringe.

    There are also claims about creating and filing tests. It appears that if you were to choose a category for your test and then create the test in that category you would not infringe. (As opposed to creating the test, putting it in a temporary folder, and then moving it to the proper place as covered by the patent.)

    Although I am skilled in the art, I am no patent lawyer. The patent system says that only a patent lawyer, and not somebody skilled in the art can say what a patent is about, so run this by your patent lawyer before making tests online.

    • In claim 13: wherein a test-maker and a proprietor of the first computer share the revenues generated by the test-taker taking the test. There must be at least two parties making money of the testing. The first being the test maker and the second being the person who owns testing computer.
      Wouldn't this also mean that a test taker using his own computer would be exempt?
    • Okay, let's go through the claims and what they really mean, because you missed a few:
      • Claim 1: Basically normal testing as we can understand it today, but wherein the test questions are entered via a remote terminal instead of on the test-server itself, and for which test takers pay for the test.
      • Claims 2-11 and 16 are dependant on Claim 1, so if you don't infringe on Claim 1, you're clean.
      • Except if you infringe on Claims 12-15, which are independant.
      • Did you even read Claim 12?!?!?!? (Those exclamation points are describing my disgust for this patent.) Same idea as Claim 1, but where users are required to input a password and "wherein the restricted directory includes academic practice tests and wherein a school enrolls students at a set cost per school year." So taking a course in a University is a way around Claim 1, but not around Claim 12. Claim 12 also doesn't require the test questions to be entered from a remote terminal.
      • Claims 13-15 are almost as bad, because they essentially close the loophole about entering the test questions from a remote terminal (ie., you can't get around Claim 1 by entering the questions directly at the server). The good thing is that they require some sharing of revenue between the test maker and the owner of the server, so TheSpark.com [thespark.com] might be in the clear.

      So forget about everything except Claim 12, because us Free Software people don't care about paying for or sharing revenue from online tests. Because of Claim 12, all schools and universities could be affected.

      The true affect of this patent then could be dependant on the meanings of the words "compile" and "directory", which will hopefully be defined down in the description of the invention, which I haven't had time to read yet. But I'm not optimistic.

    • So basically this is gonna jack up my costs when I try to take the computerized version of the Praxis at a testing center.

      Way to help out the teachers, guys!

  • Phew! Good Thing... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Atomizer ( 25193 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @10:26AM (#5222540)
    Good thing they forgot to add a Cowboy Neal option to their tests.
  • I would say any prior art in this area is about as old as the net.

  • Prior Art (Score:4, Informative)

    by MrIcee ( 550834 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @11:24AM (#5222868) Homepage
    This patent will not survive long. In August of 1995 our company did an internet site for PICTORIAL in Indianapolis. Pictorial is the nations leading seller of testing for insurance employees (among other types of tests). We were requested to design an entire on-line testing system that would enable clients to take the tests online, have them graded automatically, and have the results of the test stored and also sent out to the client.

    We complete the site in early 1996. I see that this company APPLIED for their patent in 1999.

    While I know that our system was one of the early testing systems available - it was by no means the only one.

    Again, another example of an utterly failed patent system awarding patents where prior art is VERY obvious.

    • Re:Prior Art (Score:3, Insightful)

      by DeadSea ( 69598 )
      But did you run the server for PICTORIAL and take a cut of the money the test taker paid every time you administered a test?

      If not, you do not have prior art because your situation does not meet all of the patents claims. The good news, as I said earlier, there are lots of ways to write online tests that do not infringe on this patent.

    • Blackboard [blackboard.com] is a software company/ASP that serves colleges and universities all over the place. One of the features they offer is online testing/grading. Company was founded in 1997, offering online education software since then. Not sure when the testing features were added, but I suspect they are the target of this patent.

    • According to the uspto web site this patent was filed in September 1999. I remember reading an article in Java Pro magazine around the same time on how to build a test flexible testing web-app using servlets, and xml.

      A quick google search produced this article [devx.com] by Claude Duguay in April 1999. Six months before "Inventors" Anderson and Stack filed their patent.

      The article is a bit dry, but provides excellent instruction for anyone considering to build an online testing application. The original magazine publication included all the source code. (The online version requires you to be a JavaPro subscriber to download the code.)

  • this is absurd (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by jpsst34 ( 582349 )
    So these guys patented online testing, huh? Does the US patent office even care to research before granting a patent? In the article, it doesn't even say that the recipients of the patent claim to have invented online testing. So they just happened to notice the lack of said patent for an idea that wasn't theirs and thought, "Hey, there's no patent for this, let's make us some bucks!"

    I can imagine their think-session 4 years ago...

    "Say, Jim, this internet thing seems to be catching on."
    "Yup."
    "Maybe we can make some money from it."
    "Yup."
    "I gots an idear. Let's make a list of all the common things we do with the internet, then let's go search the patent archives to find which from the list haven't been patented, and then we'll patent them and force people to pay us for them."
    "Yup."
    "It's a go. Waahoo! Neudge!"

  • Giving the "Impression" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by the_brat_king ( 443955 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @11:45AM (#5223008)
    My favourite line in the whole article is made by Mr. Posch at the end of the story:
    "We're trying to give them the impression that we want to work with them."

    So, does this mean the DON'T want to work with them? How do you "try" to give an impression? Couldn't that be considered slightly redundant?

    My problems this whole patent (an most others lately) are 1) There's the matter of "prior art" ... They applied in 1999 for this! I had already written online test sites, with accompanying software for both teachers and students (even embedded MySQL in the LAN Server installation version of the software, and the MySQL ODBC driver in the LAN client version!.) Also, I seem to remember this tiny company in Redmond, Washington offering some tests online through their MSDN program. And then there was that nobody of a company in New York, offering exams via the internet for S/390 AS/400 AIX etc. etc. Brown Institute has been whining about tests online since '98 ... it goes on and on with VERY obvious known examples of prior art!

    And then 2) it's OBVIOUS AS ALL HELL! Non-proxied distance learning (including exams) are decades old -- hell, Meathead's wife was droning on about them back in the early 80's -- adding the internet as the base media is as obvious as adding the post was, and adding teleconferences, and adding VCR's (and even LaserDiscs for a while). I was under the impression that prior art and blatant obviousness were both disqualifiers for a patent; what about the combination? Is it like simple math -- prior art? That's 1 negative! oh, it's also obvious? That's another! lets see now, we have two negatives, bad things multiply problems it must be a good patent then!

  • Anyone got prior art? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Irvu ( 248207 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @11:57AM (#5223100)
    Seriosuly given how well things have gone with SBC's patent [siliconvalley.com] perhaps its time to collect prior art examples of this and post them onto /. Can anyone think of a test that (in their humble opinion) occured online and met the standards of this patent before February 11th 1999?
    • Way back when I was in my final year of university, we had a group project to develop an online tutorial for a Computer Science concept. We included in this a quiz at the end. The questions were input from a remote terminal, and people on other remote terminals took the test. This was in early 1998, almost a year before this patent was filed. Here's the location of one of the quizzes:

      Mind you, this is a CANADIAN university, so maybe this doesn't count? Or, because we didn't force people to pay for this, it doesn't fall under the scope of the patent? Anyhow, someone with knowledge of how to report patent abuses such as this could hopefully use this as prior art.

      • "Prior art" is any published resource publicly available to the knowlegable practitioner in the field, whether it's an actual working implementation, or a description of the idea sufficiently detailed for the knowlegable practitioner in the field to actually implement.
    • I confess, I didn't read the article, and didn't read the patent. Are multiple computers required under the terms of this patent? I wrote password-protected multiple choice test software for a university in 1976. The test software and information resided in a specific directory of the mainframe (server). The tests were taken by students at dumb terminals (which of course had chips in them). If it qualifies, I think 23 years previous would count as "prior art"...
    • I haven't yet read the patent carefully (just skimmed the first page or so), but the company I used to work for, SkillCheck [skillcheck.com], has been doing this for something like a decade now. Does that count? At the time I left the company (well over a year ago, so please don't take this as me speaking for them in any way), the intent wasn't for their tests to be put on the open internet, but rather for a LAN oriented setup -- but even still, it was possible to deliver tests over HTTP to a web browser. Surely that will count as prior art, right?

      If the patent requires "making a test and posting the test online...for potential test takers", as the CrainTech article suggests, then SkillCheck (&/or one or more of their competitors) was doing that commercially well before 1999. From a quick skim of their patent, it looks like all you need is any client-server arrangement where you've got one server running a database & test logic while at the same time you can do tests & test management from the client end. Quoting just the patent abstract:

      A method of making a tests, assessments, surveys and lesson plans with images and sound files and posting them on-line for potential users. Questions are input by a test-maker and then the questions are compiled into a test by a host system and posted on-line for potential test-takers. The compiled test may be placed in a directory for access by the test-takers, the directory preferably having a plurality of categories corresponding to different types of tests and the compiled test is placed in the appropriate category. For ease in administration, a just-made test is placed into a temporary category so that it may be later reviewed (by the proprietor of the host system) and placed in the most appropriate category.

      Maybe I'm dense but where's the clever part in all of this?

      That CT article doesn't exactly paint this company in a positive light -- look at what they're trying to do: (a) not use their patent, but force companies to sign up as licensees & live off the rent from that; (b) squat on the test.com domain until someone finds it valuable enough to buy from them; (c) sell off their assets to one of the companies that they're trying to strongarm with the patent, granting them their domain name, software, and any other assets. Yuck -- if only we could count on this getting laughed out of court if they ever try to pursue it.

    • Re:Anyone got prior art? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The University of Texas at Austin Physics classes had a system for homework which was online. Values in the problems were different for each student which were accessed and submitted by a web browser. This should fall under the "assessments" category. This was in place in 1998 and I believe it was a couple of years old then.
  • Yep, preview works. I guess I owe a licensing fee now.
  • I am no lawyer, but these seem like seemingly trivial patents. How do these things get through the system? Are the patents more complex than presented here on /. and actually do contribute to something or are the patent clerks just overworked and underpaid. It would be nice to do a followup on all the patents /. has listed to see if they are still in effect or have been thrown out as dumb.
    • Who has the money to contest these patents? They are like unconstitutional laws. They stay on the books and are enforced until someone with a lot of money spends years fighting all the way up to the Supreme Court.
      • For all you old geezers who know everything, just skip this, but for those truly curious about how patents have gotten so out of hand, you may find this common knowledge of use.
        Before the Great Depression, there was a very similar state of patent affairs to what we have now. The laws were worded in a way that gave patent holders enormous rights and patent holders tended to win in court.
        During the reforms that took place after the Depression, patents were seen as monopolistic and were closely watched by a division of the Justice Department called Antitrust. In courts, the value of patents was distinctly weakened to the point that patent holders tended to lose in court and patents became an unprofitable way to manage one's business.
        These anti-patent reforms were in place through the growth decades from the end of the war and into the sixties allowing many of our favorite toys like the Xerox GUI based PC to come into existence relatively free of patent issues. If you're old enough, you might even remember hearing about consent decrees on the news at night when you were a kid. They used to be common, but I haven't heard the phrase in the headlines in decades although that's no mystery.
        In the 80s, an odd but charismatic man was elected president in a tide of big business friendly politics and himself and his associates immediately reformed the legal system regarding patents by creating a brand new court that specialized in patent cases only. This new court was called the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit AKA, the CAFC and it essentially reversed the reforms that had taken place since the Great Depression.
        Subsequently a great bubble formed in the stock market and then. . .
  • These people have an online traffic school that ends with, guess what, an online test!

    Domain Name: ONLINETRAFFICSCHOOL.COM
    Status: ACTIVE
    Creation Date: 19-nov-1997

    [whois.opensrs.net]
    Registrant:
    Online Traffic School
    645 Fourth Street
    Santa Rosa, CA 95404
    US
  • The Patent Office is going to grant somebody a patent for ... patent. Or Patent Office.

  • Want to tell the USPTO about this? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tyriel ( 560688 ) on Tuesday February 04, 2003 @06:20PM (#5226739) Homepage
    If you want to holla back at the USPTO, and tell them how much prior art has gone through these precise methods, you can mail them the below addresses, quoted from the USPTO site:

    ----------

    Please address mail to be delivered by the United States Postal Service
    (USPS) as follows:

    Box
    Commissioner for Patents
    Washington, D.C. 20231

    Please address mail to be delivered by other delivery services (Federal
    Express (Fed Ex), UPS, DHL, Laser, Action, Purolater, etc.) as follows:

    U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
    2011 South Clark Place
    Customer Window, Box
    Crystal Plaza Two, Lobby, Room 1B03
    Arlington, Virginia 22202

    ---------

    You can also call them at: 800-PTO-9199 (800-786-9199) or 703-308-HELP (703-308-4357)

    Personally, I'd quote them a dozen or so sites that use online tests regularly, especially for-profit (i guess thespark.com doesn't qualify =P) and then mention the general case of Universities, who are slowly moving towards great use of online tests to ease their administrative loads. I'm sure enough comments can get a patent reviewed.
    • AFAIK, just one posting can. Gather enough prior art and ask for re-examination. Read this carefully. I cannot provide proper advise, since I am not that familiar with US law.

      Unfortunately, you cannot participate in the proceedings, but I have cought rumours that the USPTO will change re-examination procedures to inter partes proceedings, bringing it more in line with the opposition procedures of the European and Japanese Patent Offices (both built on the unequalled German patent system (BTW, I am not a German))

  • Than the US, and perhaps Australia. With 99.99% certainty, I can tell you that this one will not be granted by the European and Japanese patent authorities, since the only thing real new is that you have to pay for your test.

    And at least the European Patent Office keeps repeating that they will never ever grant patents for this kind of stuff (pure business methods, with only the new feature being that you can earn money with it), so the solution for others is quite simple: put your server in Europe and chances of winning an infringement case will surely rise.

  • The Department of Defense was using the internet for "online testing" long before these schmucks came along.

  • What about IQ tests? I took some online in 1996. And there's all that purity test sillyness.

    How do I determine if it is prior art? What do I do if it is?

    26% pure and counting.

  • Prior Art (Score:3, Funny)

    by Teppy ( 105859 ) on Wednesday February 05, 2003 @11:56PM (#5237748) Homepage
    Yeah, we had this at CMU back in the late 80's.

    Which brings me to a funny story. There was this one "logic" class that was taken almost entirely online, tests and all, except for some optional lectures. I was dating this really dumb girl at the time ("blonde, all the way to the brain stem"), who just didn't get *anything* about the class. And she kept going to the professor and complaining that it was too hard, and it didn't make sense, and so on.

    So I think she ended up with a D for the class, which was probably generous, and she went to complain one final time. At that meeting the professor *admitted* to her that the whole thing was a sham. It wasn't a logic class at all. It was in reality, a giant psychological test to study how people react under extreme stress. And she was one of the subjects. She was vindicated! She knew it all along!

    Now I knew the professor, and he was a really cool guy, with just a bit of a mean streak. Of course CMU wouldn't let a professor conduct a covert semester-long psych experiment on students. (And a math professor at that.) That guy must still laugh about the story he told to this poor girl. I know I do.

    Anyway, my point was... oh yeah, the prior art thing.

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