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 impact of each of them? Who has liability exposure?
- In an environment where we have multiple companies litigating multiple edupatents (as we already do today), what will happen to the market? How will this affect existing educational software vendors? New entrants into the market? Open source projects? Overall customer choice?
- How do university intellectual property policies impact this environment currently? How are their efforts to lobby Congress regarding proposed changes to the patent law related to the current situation? How do their IP policies encourage or discourage this kind of environment?
- What can individual universities do to minimize the adverse impact of edupatent litigation?
- What can the university community as a whole do to impact the edupatent situation? What role can organizations such as EDUCAUSE play to help clarify the issues and foster positive collective action?
I cannot overemphasize the point that the edupatent problem is not just a Blackboard problem. We now know of 3 separate edupatents in court in the United States, and that’s only the tip of the iceburg. EDUCAUSE is performing a valuable service by raising awareness through this webinar, but I’m afraid that it will all be in vain if its individual constituent universities do not step up and confront this issue head-on.