Silly Software Patent #23: Sending Educational Content over a School Network

Cross Posted with permission from the LawGeek
Post By Jason Schultz
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Thanks to a company called eChalk and the PTO's inability to uncover good prior art in the e-learning field, we now have United States Patent No. 6,813,474:

1. An educational content communications system for processing and managing educational content of at least one school, comprising:

(a) at least one server computer and at least one client computer including, respectively, server and client processors for executing server and client input and output elements for communication between said server and client computers; and said at least one server computer further including:

(b) a user database for storing unique identification information related to users of said client computers, said users each comprising one of: students, teachers, parents and administrators;

(c) an educational content database for storing educational content that is created, managed and processed by said users;

(d) user access means for allowing users to create, process and manage said educational content for said at least one school;

(e) user management means for allowing administrators to define the educational content said users can create, manage and process;

(f) means for identifying, for each of the users, third-party educational content programs to which that user has access;

(g) means for obtaining, from a third-party educational content provider of said third-party educational content programs, user identifier and password information for each of the users that have access to said third-party educational content programs;

(h) means for storing said user identifier and password information for each of the users, and for each of said third-party educational content programs to which the users have access;

(i) means for reguesting, from said third-party educational content provider, a third-party educational content program selected by a particular user to which said particular user has access, by sending said user identifier and password information corresponding to the particular user to said third-party educational content provider; and

(j) means for delivering the requested third-party educational content program to said particular user.

What's new here? I mean, really, haven't universities and colleges distributed educational content over networks for years?