I have been reading various articles (Including one by Michael Geist), but am wanting to find out if anyone has a summary about what is happening in Canada. I read on the NoEducation Patents WIKI that BlackBoard has filed for a patent in Canada.
Are there people in the education community able to fight this patent application and/or any resulting patent? This patent, if it is granted, will be based on the new Manual of Patent Office Practises (MOPOP) that CIPO unilaterally changed to allow for information/mental process patents. The only Canadian precedent essentially says that software is not patentable, and it is well past due time to have an additional case to test the validity of CIPO's MOPOP.
Additional reading: Study of Software Patent issues I did for Industry Canada's ICT branch in 2003. Since then I received a reply to an Access to Information Request which disclosed the excessively biased "consultation" that CIPO did to confirm it's unilateral reinterpretation of patent policy to allow software patents.
There are a number of commentaries made of BlackBoard's FAQ about the patent, including one from Alfred Essa on his Information Technology in Higher Education BLOG.
Additional resources
I was sent the following additional resources in email:
I've also heard rumours that the BlackBoard that the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board is running is being replaced by something else. While this is great news, I am curious if the patent was part of the motivation. Having educators boycott Blackboard as a company might be an appropriate response to this attack using poor quality patents. While the majority of software patents wouldn't survive scrutiny in court, this one looks particularly bad and unlikely to survive. This is a simple case of abuse of patent policy to try to harm competitors.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) consultant.