A number of folks have contacted me asking for up-to-the-minute updates on the trial. To begin with, I am tagging all relevant articles so that they appear in the EduPatents feed. I probably won’t blog about most of these directly unless I feel I have something substantially new to say about them, so my advice […]
edupatents
EduPatent Busted! (But not the one you're thinking of…)
This good news in from John Lewis: A long-time target of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Patent Busting Project has finally been destroyed. Back in 1999, Test.com patented for-fee testing over the Internet and has since approached a number of publishers and universities seeking licensing fees. The patent was reexamined last year and now the PTO […]
Blackboard v Desire2Learn Trial Is Coming Up
From D2L’s patent blog: Since our last posting, we received word that the judge has decided not to rule on any summary judgment motions – he’s letting all issues go to trial. As a result, Desire2Learn’s legal folks – inside and outside counsel – have been working overtime preparing for trial. We’re going to trial […]
An Open Casket After All
Update: The intrepid Jim Farmer has also posted a copy of the D2L entry in the immagic eLibrary. As it turns out, one of your fellow e-Literate readers saved the D2L post and pasted it into the comments section of my last post. I love you guys.
Burying the Bodies
Following my last post regarding the nasty details of Blackboard’s behavior that came out during the discovery phase of the trial, we now see the following message up on the D2L blog: [Our Litigation Update post, originally posted here on October 24, has been temporarily removed, as late today we received a letter from Blackboard’s […]
Blackboard's Dirty Laundry Comes Out in Patent Trial
Desire2Learn has published some fairly tawdry details that have emerged during the discovery phase of the patent trial. (During discovery, both sides can demand to see relevant internal documents from the other side. Nasty confidential details can get exposed.) For one thing, Blackboard apparently sponsored a spy to go to the D2L user conference and […]
My Point Exactly
Inside Higher Ed has coverage of a Congressional hearing on “The Role of Federally Funded Research in the University Patent System.” Here’s the money quote: Arti K. Rai, a professor of law at Duke University School of Law, agreed that there was no need for lawmakers to contemplate “a major overhaul of the current system” […]