The EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents today was very good. (The archived event is available.) James Hilton, University of Virginia’s CIO, did a great job of laying out the fundamental conflict between the academic endeavor and the United States’ obsession with ideas as property–an idea that has infused academia through technology transfer departments among many other […]
edupatents
Blackboard's Response to the USPTO Office Action
In case you haven’t seen it yet, Blackboard has responded to the non-final invalidation of their patent by the USPTO. I’ve only had time to scan it quickly, but here are my preliminary observations. First, Blackboard has added a bunch of new dependent claims, bringing the total up to 57. (There’s a Steve Martin joke […]
What I Want from the EDUCAUSE Seminar on Edupatents
Seb has a good post up raising some questions for the free EDUCAUSE webinar on edupatents tomorrow at 1 PM Eastern time. I’ll add a few of my own (which in some ways are just extensions of Seb’s): What are the various edupatents being litigated in the United States today and what is the potential […]
More Tech Radium v. Blackboard, Inc.
I conferred with Jim Farmer on new patent infringement suit and a few interesting points came out: Tech Radium is suing Blackboard for violating three patents, some but not all of which are education-specific. This may or may not matter to you, depending on how you feel about software patents in general versus edupatents in […]
Blackboard, Inc. Sued for Patent Infringement
A company called TechRadium is suing Blackboard in East Texas (Marshall, not Lufkin) for allegedly infringing on their patent on mass notification systems. (Blackboard bought emergency notifications company NTI recently.) im+m has a copy of the complaint posted. We’ll try to get some analysis posted when we can. In the meantime, if you have a […]
Blackboard v. Desire2Learn: The First Final Judgment
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer. Delayed several days by a database failure at the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas Friday, May 2nd, the Final Judgment and associated orders for Blackboard v. Desire2Learn are now publicly available. This text is based upon publicly available records. Because much of the record […]
Is Blackboard's Lawyer Calling D2L's Customers?
Here’s an interesting bit from D2L’s patent blog: Clients have been calling us to let us know that Matthew Small, General Counsel of Blackboard, has been calling them. From what we understand, his purpose appears to be twofold: (1) to encourage clients to switch to Blackboard ; and (2) to create FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) […]