e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Sakai

  • 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 USPTO issue a preliminary ruling along with a re-exam order in an Inter Partes challenge. That means we should know shortly whether the government is upholding the patent, narrowing it, or invalidating it altogether.

    Stay tuned.

    There are a number of events that are likely to cascade from this ruling rather quickly. I will not always have time to blog now about every post and development that I see. However, I will, at the very least, tag items I see for inclusion in the Edupatent Alerts. (I hope that you will do the same.) If you want to follow these developments closely, I strongly suggest that you subscribe by email or RSS.

  • 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 really didn’t matter much. A lot has been written about this in the past few days and I don’t really have anything new to add.

    If you’re playing catch-up on the issue, you’ll want to start with Blackboard’s own page on the patent pledge. Equally important to read and read carefully is the joint statement by the EDUCAUSE and Sakai Foundation boards in response. In posting the letter to the Saki listserv, Sakai Foundation Board Chairman John Norman introduced it with the following warning:

    Bb announced an Open Source Patent pledge today. www.blackboard.com

    In their press release they refer to ‘collaboration’ with Sakai and Educause. Our ‘collaboration’ was to try make it as useful as possible. Since Bb quote selectively from our statement, I reproduce it in full below. It will go up on the Sakai website later today.

    I recommend taking John at his word and read the whole letter, in part because it is very well-crafted and encapsulates a lot of the sentiments–both postive and negative–that have been expressed about the pledge since the announcement. For your convenience, I have reproduced the letter in its entirety “below the fold” in this post.

    Inside Higher Education has a good piece on the story this morning, with quotes from many of the usual suspects as well as a few unusual ones. THE Journal has some good, in-depth quotes from Sakai and Blackboard representatives. Slashdot has picked up the story as well, and includes a few interesting and informative comments. Not covered in any of these are comments from the bloggers you’ll always want to read on this topic, including (but not limited to) Seb, Barry, and Stephen. Also interesting is Elgg developer Ben Werdmuller’s (re)assertion that Bb’s patent wouldn’t cover Elgg anyway.

    Since the community as gotten so good at responding to these issues, I think we should take better advantage of the whole RSS thing and consolidate the various comments for easier consumption. If people blogging on this topic would include “edupatents” as a tag or somewhere in the body of their post text, I would be happy to set up an aggregator on e-Literate that scoops up those posts (and would encourage others to do the same). Let me know if there is interest in this; it would be pretty easy for me to do.

    Now, if you haven’t seen the EDUCAUSE/Sakai statement, keep reading:

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  • Oracle AEI at the Sakai Atlanta Conference

    Here, thanks to the magic of SlideShare, are the slides from one of the Academic Enterprise Initiative (AEI) presentations at the Atlanta conference:

    A few comments on the presentation are in order:

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  • Bodington at the Sakai Conference

    This is the first installment of my promised non-patent (and non-patented) coverage of the Sakai Atlanta conference. I’m going to start with Bodington, in part because I continue to be really impressed with these guys. In my opinion, they are doing some of the most interesting work in the LMS/VLE space today. They are also the furthest along of anyone in terms of realizing the kind of system design that my colleagues and I have been calling an LMOS.

    As you may know, Bodington is going to be using Sakai as the framework for the next generation of their platform. I wrote a few posts about Bodington a while back, shortly after the announcement. The conference gave me several opportunities to hear more from the Bod team about their thinking, their project, and their progress.

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  • Blackboard Patent Celebrity Death Match

    I note with satisfaction that Eben Moglen’s keynote speech [MP3] and debate with Matthew Small [MP3] have already been reported and commented on in a number of places. (See, for example, Seb’s analysis.) This pleases me for two reasons. First, it means we have developed a healthy community response mechanism to make sure we are all informed of future patent shenanigans. The second reason it pleases me is because, frankly, I’m sick of talking about nothing but the patent fight. The Sakai conference, for example, was excellent, and there were many good conversations that I’d much rather blog about (and will blog about in due course). That said, since I was actually in the room for both presentations, I feel obliged to give my own gloss on them.

    Moglen’s keynote was fascinating. The guy is clearly brilliant. While I didn’t agree with everything he had to say, I agreed with much of it and learned much from it. The talk is well worth listening to and well worth sharing with others. Alas, I cannot say that I feel the same way about the debate between Moglen and Small.

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  • Ex Parte and Inter Partes Patent Re-Examination

    As you know by now, the Blackboard patent has been challenged at the USPTO by separate requests filed by the SFLC and D2L respectively. SFLC filed what’s known as an ex parte request, while D2L filed what’s known as an inter partes request. I think it’s important for the community to become familiar with these two strategies because we’re likely to see them employed again in our future. Seb has some nice commentary up about the basics of the specific situation with the Blackboard patent. (Be sure to read the comments; there’s one by one of the leading researchers on patent re-examination.) What follows here is more of a high-level overview of the legal strategies in general.
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  • What the Sakai/Moodle/ATutor Re-Examination Request Really Means

    By now you’ve probably seen that the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a request to re-examine Blackboard’s patent with the USPTO on behalf of Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor. You may have also seen that D2L has filed a different kind of re-examination request with the USPTO. (SFLC’s request is what’s known as ex parte, while D2L’s is inter partes.) I’ll have more to say about the legal maneuvers in tomorrow’s post. For now, I’d like to address a larger context.

    The Sakai/Moodle/ATutor request is generally being characterized as the “Open Source” response to Blackboard’s patent. This is unfortunate, as is the fact that SFLC is perceived to be leading the charge. Because to my mind, the most important message from this filing to Blackboard and the market has nothing to do with Open Source.

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