Since my last post, I’ve gotten some good feedback from folks who are knowledgeable about the issues. I hope to write about this topic in more detail after I’ve gotten back from EDUCAUSE and had some time to do a little more research, but in the meantime, I want to at least mention two of […]
edupatents
Backward University IP Polices Force Convoluted Sakai License
A couple of weeks back, I was somewhat disturbed to read a post by Unicon’s John Lewis on the forthcoming Version 2.0 of the Educational Commons License (ECL), which is used by both the Sakai and the Kuali projects. While pointing out some significant improvements over the previous version, John notes correctly that the proliferation […]
Court Re-affirms Invalidation of First 35 Blackboard Patent Claims
This just in from the D2L patent blog: On August 4, we announced that Magistrate Judge Hines had issued his Memorandum Opinion Construing Claim Terms of the United States Patent No. 6,988,138 (the “Markman” decision). We noted that the decision was subject to procedural appeal. The decision rendered claims 1-35 invalid. On August 22, we […]
On Edupatents, Corporate Branding, and Putting Words in People's Mouths
There’s a write-up of the edupatent flap in eSchool News. It provides a reasonably good summary of the basic history, as far as these types of stories tend to go, and also gives a high-level account of the current state of the legal battle. (Short version: It’s dragging on.) All in all, it’s a useful […]
Should Universities Patent Their Research? Universities Say Yes. But should they?
This is a guest blog post by Jim Farmer, Coordinator, Scholarly Systems Group at Georgetown University and editor at the eReSS project, University of Hull. At the December 2006 Sakai Conference in Atlanta many expressed the view that patents inhibit collaboration and innovation in teaching and learning. But that was not the view expressed by […]
Blackboard v iParadigms Is Over
As has already been reported in several other fora, Blackboard and iParadigms (the maker of Turnitin) have settled their patent dispute out of court and are working together again as partners. I’m not sure that we’ll ever really know what happened between the two companies, but any amicable settlement that leads to the non-assertion of […]
Sorting Out the Issues in Blackboard v iParadigms
The latest news is that Blackboard has stated that the language of the intellectual property waiver in their contract with iParadigms was specific to that contract, motivated by specific concerns about the particular company and business relationship involved. Blackboard further states the language is not present in their standard Building Blocks contract or other partner […]