Here is a press release by Thomson Learning about their decision to become a Sakai commercial affiliate. It has all the usual statements about working with the community, supporting open standards, and so on. But what caught my attention, down in the sixth paragraph of a six-paragraph press release, was the following statement by Thomson Learning’s Chief […]
edupatents
Blackboard Announces New 'Institutional Effectiveness Platform'; Patents Pending
From today’s press release: BbWorld Europe, Nice, France – February 26, 2007 – Blackboard Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBB), a leading provider of enterprise technology to the education industry, today unveiled, at the Annual BbWorld Europe 2007 Users Conference in Nice, its latest and most significant product offering, the Blackboard Outcomes System™ in front of 400 European […]
USPTO Orders Blackboard Patent Re-examined–Again
We interrupt our regularly scheduled blog post to bring you this breaking news: Based on Desire2Learn’s Inter Partes request, the USPTO has ordered that the Blackboard patent be re-examined. This is a separate ruling from the one in response to the Ex Parte Sakai/ATutor/Moodle filing. As I have previously noted, the law requires that the […]
EduPatent Alerts
Via Stephen Downes, I see that Mark Oehlert posted a list of Blackboard’s pending patents, 8 of which were filed for in the last year (6 of which were filed in October and November of last year), and many of which are not covered in Blackboard’s patent pledge. This has prompted me to invest a […]
Birthplace of Blackboard Comments on Patent Issue
Here’s an interesting article (ironically titled “Suit Threatens Blackboard Inc.”) from the campus newspaper at Cornell University, the birthplace of Blackboard: Only time will tell how Blackboard Inc., Cornell’s course management software provider, will fare on campus and throughout the country. Amid a national legal debate over the scope of Blackboard’s “Internet-based education support system […]
Desire2Learn Responds to the Blackboard Pledge
Here’s the meat from the full post: We at Desire2Learn are unwavering in our position that the patent claims are invalid and unenforceable against Open Source, our competitors, and us, and that we do not infringe on the claims. We look forward to a decision by the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) on […]
The Blackboard Patent Pledge
I’m late to the party on the pledge news for a variety of reasons (not the least of which is a recalcitrant DNS server out there in the ether that denied me access to my new blog site for the better part of the last two days…grr). It is gratifying to see that my absence […]