e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard-Inc.

  • Blackboard's Response to the USPTO Office Action

    In case you haven’t seen it yet, Blackboard has responded to the non-final invalidation of their patent by the USPTO. I’ve only had time to scan it quickly, but here are my preliminary observations.

    First, Blackboard has added a bunch of new dependent claims, bringing the total up to 57. (There’s a Steve Martin joke in here somewhere.) It is within the rights of the patent holder to modify or add claims during a challenge under certain conditions (e.g., it can’t add new independent claims that would broaden the scope of the patent.) I haven’t looked at these new claims (and won’t look at them), but in general, patent holders can take advantage of the re-examination process to actually strengthen their patents. It would appear that Blackboard is attempting to do so here.

    Second, one of Blackboard’s main arguments appears to be that none of the prior art submitted shows a system in which a person can log on once and simultaneously be a teacher in one class and a student in another with different access permissions in each case. If you have to log in separately to access each role, or if you can have multiple roles but these roles don’t affect your access privileges, then you don’t have prior art (they claim). I am not going to have time to go back through the prior art documentation in the D2L and SFLC re-exam appendices, but if you have the time and inclination to look, all documentation can be found here. In addition to the question of whether the prior art does or does not point to a system with these characteristics, there is also the question of whether the USPTO accepts Blackboard’s characterization of what the patent says in the first place.

  • What I Want from the EDUCAUSE Seminar on Edupatents

    Seb has a good post up raising some questions for the free EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents tomorrow at 1 PM Eastern time. I’ll add a few of my own (which in some ways are just extensions of Seb’s):

    • What are the various edupatents being litigated in the United States today and what is the potential impact of each of them? Who has liability exposure?
    • In an environment where we have multiple companies litigating multiple edupatents (as we already do today), what will happen to the market? How will this affect existing educational software vendors? New entrants into the market? Open source projects? Overall customer choice?
    • How do university intellectual property policies impact this environment currently? How are their efforts to lobby Congress regarding proposed changes to the patent law related to the current situation? How do their IP policies encourage or discourage this kind of environment?
    • What can individual universities do to minimize the adverse impact of edupatent litigation?
    • What can the university community as a whole do to impact the edupatent situation? What role can organizations such as EDUCAUSE play to help clarify the issues and foster positive collective action?

    I cannot overemphasize the point that the edupatent problem is not just a Blackboard problem. We now know of 3 separate edupatents in court in the United States, and that’s only the tip of the iceburg. EDUCAUSE is performing a valuable service by raising awareness through this webinar, but I’m afraid that it will all be in vain if its individual constituent universities do not step up and confront this issue head-on.

  • Didn't See This One Coming

    The business processes of Blackboard as interpreted through Bollywood movies.

    And if that doesn’t get you curious enough to click on a hyperlink, then you’re a lost cause.

  • The Creepy Treehouse

    There’s an article in NC State’s campus newspaper about Blackboard’s Facebook integration. I’m always interested to hear what actual students think about all the Web 2.0 for education stuff we tend to hyperventilate about. There isn’t a lot of new information in the piece, but I did love this classic piece of snarkiness:

    Blackboard won’t be the last education company attempting to break into Facebook’s user pool. It’s a phenomenon that [Associate Provost Lou] Harrison called the ‘creepy tree house effect,’ defined by technological education experts as an online environment created by instructors or institutions that mimics an established and trusted environment.

    The term arises from the concept that children can identify a ‘creepy tree house’ that adults built and will avoid it. Perhaps it explains why, when this issue went to press, Blackboard Sync had only 161 daily active users.

  • More Tech Radium v. Blackboard, Inc.

    I conferred with Jim Farmer on new patent infringement suit and a few interesting points came out:

    • Tech Radium is suing Blackboard for violating three patents, some but not all of which are education-specific. This may or may not matter to you, depending on how you feel about software patents in general versus edupatents in particular.
    • Tech Radium has held at least one of these patents for 2 years but is only filing suit now. It’s likely that NTI wasn’t big enough to go after from a financial perspective but that Blackboard is.
    • As is usually the case in these sorts of situations, Blackboard has a strong economic motive to settle quickly. They now have first-hand knowledge of how long and expensive a patent fight can be. They will want to eliminate any uncertainty in their market around their product, which has apparently been selling well, as quickly as possible. And they are big enough that they can probably afford to pay royalties.
    • Tech Radium also has strong incentive to settle quickly. Getting a settlement from Blackboard would strengthen their infringement case against any other challenger, effectively blocking other likely entrants–including open source entrants–into this market.

    Keep in mind that these are patents about unified messaging to mobile phones and the like. This is a critical growth area for educational technology. It is in the interest of higher education to see Blackboard fight this patent, just as it has been in the interest of higher education to see D2L fight the ‘138 patent.

  • Blackboard, Inc. Sued for Patent Infringement

    A company called TechRadium is suing Blackboard in East Texas (Marshall, not Lufkin) for allegedly infringing on their patent on mass notification systems. (Blackboard bought emergency notifications company NTI recently.) im+m has a copy of the complaint posted. We’ll try to get some analysis posted when we can. In the meantime, if you have a chance to read the complaint and notice anything noteworthy in it, please comment on it here so that we can consolidate these observations and follow up.

  • Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment

    This is a guest post by Jim Farmer.

    Delayed several days by a database failure at the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Friday, May 2nd, the Final Judgment and associated orders for Blackboard v. Desire2Learn are now publicly available.

    This text is based upon publicly available records. Because much of the record is “sealed” and not available to the public, and the transcript is available only upon payment to the court reporter, the complete record, as available to counsel, may provide a different perspective.

    (more…)