Oh, trust me, I read past the claims section.. these were two patents that caught my attention because they were on slashdot previously, and I wanted to see what the average software patent looked like. They always look like a laywer and a programmer sat down and translated every diagram and requirements document into legalese.
I mean look...
The system management tools available with the present invention allow system administrators to monitor, control and customize an institution's online teaching and learning environment from the web browser. The system administrator may control security permissions and enable/disable features for numerous user roles. Batch user enrollment (and unenrollment) may be performed system wide. Preferences and options may be managed on multiple courses, all from within a central system administrator panel. The system administrator may also track and report faculty, student and course statistics, may plan and manage system hardware requirements by assigning instructors with pre-assigned disk quotas for content storage, and may employ system-wide announcements to broadcast messages to users about system maintenance or institutional announcements.
In the Course & Portal Manager embodiment, the enterprise database support provides support for tens of thousands of users across an entire institution or system of institutions. User and course data may be managed efficiently and effectively. Moreover, large volumes of transactions may be managed efficiently and effectively. The "My Institution" interface includes portal and community functionality along with quick access to web email, course and institutional announcements, and links to other campus departments. Administrators may enable or disable portal modules and establish required and optional modules from the portal options menu bar. Administrators may also assign different portal default settings to different user roles (e.g. students get different portals than instructors).
Course e-commerce management functionality allows institutions to set prices and charge fees for course enrollment directly through the "e-Learning" platform
That's in the "DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS" section. That's like a back of the box product description. I know they go into more detail later, but it's always meaningless minutiae about what part of the website connects to what, or the fact that such and such field would be retrieved from a database. Well duh. Were these bad examples? Is this what a "design patent" looks like?
Even the figures are mostly grossly simplified networking diagrams and *screenshots* of the web interface. I mean, come on!
The second patent looks better, but the novel parts look to be in exactly how they tie information from different logged in users. It definitely seems *interesting*, but it sounds like it's interesting because their problem domain is unusual, not because the concept is amazingly novel independently of that.
Don't get me wrong, the flow chart comment aside, I think I qualify as a someone reasonably proficient in the field. Up until recently my job was primarily doing aeronatic and numerical processing code for the DoD and designing a library and application for easily integrating aeronautic flight models for the purposes of weapons effectiveness and defensive analysis in dogfights primarily for use at Top Gun and Fallon.
And these (well, mainly the first one) sound like nearly useless 50,000 views of a system filled mostly with information that you could garner just from *using* the system.
You know what seems like a straightforward patent? http://www.google.com/patents?vid=4405829 RSA is the most deserving software idea I can think of for being granted a patent... and it seemed to stall web commerce for a decade. It was absolutely a deserved patent... but the barrier to entry for software is just *so low*. It actually seems more valuable to keep the barriers to entry into software engineering low than what encouragement is gained even very deserving patents. Oh, and a very similar idea was invented 5 years earlier in Britain, but was kept secret due to national security concerns, but that's besides the point.
I'm not saying that you do it, but so many people I've heard of that work with patents view patents as something of a land grab. You know -- it doesn't matter if you thought of it too, I thought of it *first*. Rather than how they're intended, to help promote progress until the point that they no longer do, and then stop.