Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog: Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) […]
Blackboard-Inc.
What the Sakai Announcement Means
Barry Dahl read the Sakai Foundation’s recent announcement about the Blackboard patent pretty closely and is concerned that it sounds like they think the fight is over. I completely understand why he interpreted it that way, but I read it a little differently. If you look closely at the specifics of the legal situation, the […]
Interview with an East Texas IP Lawyer on Blackboard v Desire2Learn
A few of the usual suspects have pointed to this one already, but in case you haven’t seen it yet, Barry Dahl has a fantastic podcast interview up (about 30 minutes) with Michael C. Smith, an intellectual property lawyer in the district where the case was filed and author of EDTexweblog. Both interviewer and interviewee […]
Blackboard Fails Statistics 101
Blackboard has posted their response to the USPTO ruling. They make some claims about how this will impact the trial, which I’m not in a position to evaluate just yet. They mention that all of the claims in the re-examination request “were unsuccessfully raised by Desire2Learn during recent litigation,” which is irrelevant since these are […]
All 44 Blackboard Patent Claims Invalidated by USPTO
This just in: On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard’s claims. We caution that this is a NON-final action; both Blackboard and Desire2Learn will […]
Bad News for Blackboard, Good News for Moodle
The American Association of Community College’s Instructional Technology Council (ITC) has just published its 2007 Distance Education Survey Results, covering data from 154 U.S. community colleges. And there’s a lot of interesting stuff in it. Here are the headlines that I drew from it: Distance education continues to grow at a very healthy clip, particularly […]
Desire2Live
There’s a very interesting interview of Desire2Learn CEO John Baker and General Counsel Diane Lank in T.H.E. Journal. It’s a particularly good read if you haven’t been keeping up on the details of the trial, but there’s also good stuff in it for people who have been following closely. For me personally, the biggest bit […]