e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: edupatents

  • An Example of How the Blackboard Patent Could Chill Innovation

    Blackboard’s General Counsel Matthew Small has said that their patent and lawsuit is “not about hindering innovation.” It’s important that we not allow this claim to go unchallenged. I’d like to start gathering concrete examples of initiatives that are beneficial to the educational community and could be directly harmed by Blackboard’s actions. I’ll start. The first example I can think of is the developing IMS Common Cartridge standard.

    (more…)

  • More on Evolving the Wikipedia Prior Art Page

    Update: How annoying. Even with the URL escaped in my post and the emoticon module turned off in ExpressionEngine, the software insists on rendering the key combination of a colon followed by a P in the URL as a smiley face. I really must find somebody who can help me migrate to WordPress….

    Thanks to the help of experienced Wikipedians, we have some helpful critiques of the History of Virtual Learning Environments page. You can see them on the peer review page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:
    Peer_review/History_of_virtual_learning_environments    ) and the discussion page for the article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
    Talk:History_of_virtual_learning_environments    ). Sorry these aren’t active hyperlinks. For some reason, the colons in the URLs appear to be confusing ExpressionEngine so it renders the hyperlinks funny.

    Please lend a hand by helping to implement the suggested edits.

  • Desire2Learn Posts Supplemental Materials on Blackboard Patent and Lawsuit

    A reader tipped me off that Desire2Learn now has its own blog up about the Blackboard lawsuit, and that the page contains supplemental legal documents that have not been made public before now. There’s a lot here to be read and analyzed. I haven’t had a chance to review them myself thoroughly yet because I didn’t want to wait on getting the info out to the rest of the community. At first blush, though, a few interesting things jump out: (more…)

  • First Mainstream Press Article about the Blackboard Patent

    The Kitchener Record, Desire2Learn’s hometown newspaper, is running a story on the patent infringement suit. With luck, more mainstream media outlets will begin reporting on it soon.

    I’d like to address one comment in the article by Blackboard’s General Counsel, Matthew Small. He said,

    This is not about reducing competition, it’s not about hindering innovation, and it is something we think is in line with our duty to our clients to protect their investment in us as well as to protect the investment we’ve made in our technology.

    There are a number of ways in which this statement is off-base. (more…)

  • Wikipedia Page Call for Reviewers

    With some encouragement from Seb Schmoller and David Jennings, I searched for and found a way to ask Wikipedia editors at-large to peer review our History of Virtual Learning Environments page for tone and for compliance with their style guide. (You’ll see an icon and text box to this effect prominently displayed at the top of the wiki page.) We want our contributions to be factual, fair, and consistent with the spirit of the Wikipedia project.

  • The Blackboard Patent Claims in Plain English

    Here are my plain English interpretations of the 44 Blackboard patent claims. From what I can tell, the following Learning Management Systems have most or all of the features listed in the claims and therefore may infringe on the patent: (more…)

  • Blackboard, Copyright, and Patents

    Al Essa has a great post up that covers the basic differences between a copyright and a patent as well as laying the groundwork for a dissection of Blackboard’s claims (presumably forthcoming). In the meantime, I am in the process of translating the 44 claims in their patent into plain English. When you see what they are actually claiming to have invented, you will be well and truly gobsmacked. I’ll post it as soon as some colleagues who are smarter than I am have proofread it for me.