e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edupatents

  • iParadigm's Statement on the Suit

    Stephen has a press statement [.doc] from iParadigms, as does Al Essa. There are definitely (at least) two sides to this story, but I do want to highlight one bullet point from the statement:

    Our letters asked Blackboard to educate us regarding whether a new technology Blackboard acquired was related to our patent so that we could see if it was appropriate to establish an additional business relationship with Blackboard.

    It’s hard to read “establish an additional business relationship” in this context as meaning anything other than Blackboard paying patent royalties to iParadigm. Generally, when you get a letter from a lawyer saying that your products may infringe on patents owned by the lawyer’s client, you’re not going to interpret that letter as the opening for a cheerful talk regarding how you all can do more business together.

    I think it’s important to be clear about the nature of iParadigm’s letter when evaluating the appropriateness of Blackboard’s response to it.

  • Update on Blackboard v Turnitin

    Update: immagic has several more documents available (one, two, three, four) on what is apparently an outgrowth of a long-running conflict between iParadigms, the company that owns Turnitin, and Sciworth, the company that owns the Safe Assignment anti-plagiarism technology licensed by Blackboard. I haven’t read any of this documentation but am pointing you to it in the interest of getting as much raw data out to the community as possible.

    More documentation is available. Apparently, Blackboard is not threatening Turnitin with a patent. Turnitin is threatening Blackboard with their patent. Blackboard is pro-actively filing suit in response to the threat, claiming that…

    …well…

    …there are some very strange twists to this one, folks…

    (more…)

  • Has Blackboard Filed Another Patent Suit?

    It certainly looks that way. As usual, immagic has what little court documentation is publicly available. The defendant, by the way, appears to be the company that owns Turnitin.

    We know very, very little at this point. Stay tuned.

  • First 35 Claims of Blackboard's Patent Ruled Invalid

    According to D2L’s patent blog, the judge in the patent case just ruled the first 35 of the 44 claims in Blackboard’s current patent invalid:

    The more significant, immediate result is that the Court found the “Means for assigning a level of access to and control of each data file based on a user of the system’s predetermined role in a course,” a “means-plus-function” term, to be indefinite. See pages 16-17 of the Memorandum Opinion. Because that phrase is indefinite, all of Claim 1 is rendered invalid because of indefiniteness. Further, all dependent claims that rely on Claim 1 (in our case, Claims 2 through 35) are similarly invalid.

    There’s more to the ruling, too. The Court agreed with  D2L’s definitions of certain terms in the patent, which could impact the way the surviving pieces of the patent are litigated at trial.  If you’ve been following the legal maneuverings closely, you may want to check out the whole post.

    Note that this development is completely unrelated to either of the pending re-examinations or, apparently, to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the nature of “obviousness” in the patent law. It was something that came out of the Markman Hearing, which is the part of the trial in which the court determines literally what the patent means for the purposes of the trial. It sounds from this post as if the court may have found that the first claim doesn’t have a specific enough meaning to be patentable, and that the 34 claims that depend on that first claim therefore are also not patentable.
    This appears to be a pretty significant victory for D2L.

  • Desire2Learn and Blackboard Technology Tutorials for the Patent Case

    D2L has posted the Flash-based technology tutorials that both sides prepared for the court (for viewing by the Judge? The Jury?). The presentations are intended to give summaries of their arguments and evidence in relatively non-technical terms and with a minimum of legal jargon as well. Finally, we have clear statements on what each side thinks the patent means. I hope that decision-makers in universities will take the opportunity to review these arguments and make their own evaluations regarding the merits of the patent and its prosecution.
    D2L’s is here and Blackboard’s is here. However, D2L warns,

    Note that the Blackboard tutorial was not designed to run on the web, and lacks a preloader. Please be patient until the initial file is loaded (15-30 seconds or more, depending on your connection speed). For similar reasons, the audio file may be inconsistent. Although Desire2Learn obtained permission to post the file, we do not have the source files to correct the situation. Our apologies for any inconvenience.

    Thanks to Seb Schmoller and other friends for alerting me to this.

  • Blackboard and D2L Markman Filings Are Up

    Thanks to Seb for the reference.

    D2L has posted the latest filings from both sides, detailing their competing interpretations of Blackboard’s patent. (Before you can decide if somebody has infringed on a patent, you first have to decide what that patent means.) The judge will evaluate these competing claims in what’s known as a Markman hearing.

    I haven’t read the documents, but according to Seb, D2L’s filing references the Wikipedia page on the History of Virtual Learning Environments that the ed tech community collectively created in response to the Blackboard patent. If you contributed to that page (and hundreds of people did), then give yourself a pat on the back. You played a small role in the legal history of our profession.

  • Tim Lee and EduPatents

    Correction: Thanks to Seb Schmoller for pointing out that the op ed piece is not, in fact, by Tim Berners Lee but by Timothy B. Lee. Very different guy. Nevertheless, the points made by…um…the other Tim Lee are no less valid than they would have been coming from The Man Himself.

    There’s a great op ed piece in the New York Times by Tim Berners Lee Timothy B. Lee on the impact of software patents, drawing on a 1991 quote from Bill Gates:

    Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” Mr. Gates worried that “some large company will patent some obvious thing” and use the patent to “take as much of our profits as they want.”

    He goes on to use the Verizon suit against Vonage as an example of why he believes Gates was right then and is wrong now:

    The Gates memo predicted that a large company would “patent some obvious thing,” and that’s exactly what Verizon has done. Two of its patents cover the concept of translating phone numbers into Internet addresses. It is virtually impossible to create a consumer-friendly Internet telephone product without doing that. So if Verizon prevails on appeal, it will probably be able to drive Vonage out of business. Consumers will suffer from fewer choices and higher prices, and future competitors will be reluctant to enter markets dominated by patents.

    There’s no mention of the education market in his editorial, but the inference is not a hard one to make regarding the dangers to our industry. This is a great piece to share with anyone in education who has questions about why people worry about edupatents.