You may recall that Blackboard originally won a judgment of $3.3 million from Desire2Learn in their lawsuit. The ruling from the Court of Appeals means that Blackboar will probably have to return that money—plus interest—to Desire2Learn, as Blackboard indicates in an 8-K SEC filing today. The filing says, in part, that Blackboard “expects to record one-time charges of approximately $3.5 million related to the reversal of the district court judgment” of which $3.3 million is the money they have to return and the extra $200K is presumably interest.
Now, here’s the thing. According to Blackboard’s 2008 10-K filing, their net income for that year was $2.8 million. If you subtract the $3.3 million in income that they are going to have to return to D2L from the $2.8 million net profit, it appears that Blackboard’s business actually lost $500K in 2008.
Comments
2 responses to “The Financial Impact of the Patent Loss on Blackboard”
One presumes as well that BB’s stock price will take an additional hit after the ruling, though this may have already been factored in (it wasn’t actually a huge surprise, was it?) And the cost of the animosity they have engendered in the higher ed community because of this patently baseless action – priceless!
[…] https://eliterate.us/the-financial-impact-of-the-patent-loss-on-blackboard/ […]