Be careful if you've "learned" anything. You just might owe someone.
If someone came up to you with a request for a $5 bill because you had 'accidently' learned something the previous day without paying him his owner's due for the "learning" process, you'd be confused at best...and walk away. Or smirk. Or buy him coffee for entertainment value.
If the next day, you received a professional looking letter from We Got Ya Lawyers, Ltd. saying that not only did you owe their client $5 for your unauthorized use of their "learning" patent, and that you additionally owed them another $300 for back use of "learning" and for lawyers fees, you'd go from confusion to and shock. And assume the hidden cameras were rolling or Terry Gilliam had somehow transported you into one of his surreal films.
By the way, I'm filing a patent on learning. It's a process by which the brain of a human being connects neural pathways in response to outside stimuli. The patent includes, ipso facto, hearing, sight, smell, taste, talking and feeling. If you don't cease learning immediately, you will hear from my attorney, ab abusu ad usum non valet consequentia, ab irato, et audentes fortuna iuvat.
And why would it make me smile, amongst others?
Beyond the dopey DOPA bill of late, the other are-ya-kiddin'-me moment within the intersection of learning and the federal government came out of the US Patent Office's rule that Blackboard was awarded a patent for the "Learning Management System" (LMS, in info-circle-speak).
What does this mean? Via Harold Jarche (always with a great eye for topics), read the definitiion here:
...a course-based system for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of online courses, comprising: a) a plurality of user computers, with each user computer being associated with a user of the system and with each user being capable of having predefined characteristics indicative of multiple predetermined roles in the system, each role providing a level of access to a plurality of data files associated with a particular course and a level of control over the data files associated with the course with the multiple predetermined user roles comprising at least two user’s predetermined roles selected from the group consisting of a student role in one or more course associated with a student user, an instructor role in one or more courses associated with an instructor user and an administrator role associated with an administrator user, and b) a server computer in communication with each of the user computers over a network, the server computer comprising: means for storing a plurality of data files associated with a course, means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system’s predetermined role in a course; means for determining whether access to a data file associated with the course is authorized; means for allowing access to and control of the data file associated with the course if authorization is granted based on the access level of the user of the system.
Mama, Mia!
So, as Jay gets his legal ownership fingers wrapped around "learning", I'm going to file for patent ownership of "the future". Maybe he and I can create a merger and become Masters of the Universe.
Either way, an intriguing series of conversations going on out there. Glad that it introduced me to Jay, even if the rest seems well beyond my ability to impact for the better.
The US Patent office will actually entertain this patent attempt? This is ridiculous. This is like someone patenting writing or dancing. There needs to be some boundaries here..
Posted by: Joy | August 05, 2006 at 06:31 PM