This is yet another example of patents out of control. A company named Blackboard apparently “invented” the idea of allowing a single user to operate with different roles for different courses in an online learning system.
How, oh how can this be considered patentable. The concept of roles, and the ability to assign the same user different roles in different concepts has been around since the dawn of information systems. This is not an original idea!!!
All I can hope is that Obama’s promised patent reforms will address issues like this one.
More and more, I’m leaning toward the position of “NO SOFTWARE PATENTS”. This based on the fact that I have yet to see software patent that actually has merit.