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Blackboard Patenting Educational Groupware
chizz writes "Online learning provider Blackboard announced the other day that it has patented the Learning Management System (LMS). The very same day it went after Desire2Learn for Patent infringement in a truly Salt Lake City kinda way. A great many educators are a bit shook up by this, and are stockpiling prior art all over the place. "
of the incompetence in the US patent office. There is nothing patentable about Blackboard. It introduces nothing new to teaching, to learning, or anything. It's a horrible patent, and I hope the court finds the patent invalid. Besides, Mallard was the first online teaching environment, so UIUC should be suing Blackboard.
I've just lost a lot of respect for these guys with this patent BS. Long live Moodle!
I wonder what dividends owning a security hole pays?
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http://seclists.org/lists/fulldisclosure/2006/Jul
I can't imagine this isn't a long term strike against the Open Source LMSs out there. There's no real commercial competition anymore in the field with WebCT gone. Desire2Learn, Angel and the rest are ants under the feet of the Blackboard elephant, but Sakai and Moodle are getting real traction- the real buzz at EDUCAUSE isn't at the BB booth but at Sakai talks, the college just up the road dumped BB for Moodle this summer, etc.
I had a long conversation with some BB salesdroids last year and they more or less admitted that BB's long term future isn't their LMS, it's the OneCard system. They get a cut out of every purchase made with it, and it's a real cash cow.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
then you probably could jam-through a patent for just about anything
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The suit, like almost all recent patent suits, was filed in the E.D. of Texas because the district is a "rocket docket" - i.e. cases are quickly tried there. The E.D. Texas also has tremendous patent experience, as their judges have presided over several patent cases (which is rare in most other districts). The juries also tend to me more educated (and pro-patent/inventor) than in most other areas.
This has never been the rule or law in the U.S. - a federal suit can be filed anywhere where there is personal jurisdiction and venue. As the allegedly infringing products are probably offered for sale or sold in the E.D. of Texas, the requirements for jurisdiction and venue are likely easily met.
Suits are rarely brought where the defendant has a large presence because juries and judges always favor the hometown team (imagine Toyota suing Ford in Michigan).
...in Guelph Canada. I'm typing this in a session about the new features in 8.1 :)
:)
The CEO of D2L, John Baker, wrote this LMS while a grad student enrolled at the University of Guelph in Ontario Canada. The facts scream "prior art" and Blackboard really has no case IMHO. I think the strategy here, as John put it, is to sue D2L to a point where it'd be in D2L's best interest to avoid expensive litigation and just get taken over by Blackboard. The hidden backstory here is that Blackboard wants so badly to take over D2L but D2L doesn't want any part of that. So Blackboard takes the other, more scenic route: sue them into oblivion.
I can almost guarantee that Blackboard will lose this suit. The fact that D2L existed before Blackboard was even a gleam in the eye of its writer is 98% of the case.
In any way, John was so confident about his ability to win this suit he gave us all extra drink tickets!
"This food is problematic."
Most of the claims in Blackboard's patent are for concepts many LMSes had at the time (assignments, tests, lectures, grading, announcements, login, discussion area, chat). I was working with a competitive company at the time the patent was filed. The system we worked on was already in use by many colleges on the West Coast, with most of the features listed by June 30th, 2000, so most of the claims can be shown to be prior art.
This patent will not matter much. I don't see any particular reason to worry about it and here's why (IANAL!):
1. The patent relies on 44 claims, most of which can easily be shown to be prior art. (Ironically, WebCT, which was bought out by BlackBoard might be used as a counterexample of prior art).
3. To violate the Patent you would have to be substantially equivalent. Essentially this means someone would have to substantially rely on Blackboard's look and feel for providing LMS services.
4. The patent heavily relies on the concept of "files" - like our old system, which used flat files for information management (no, we did not and could not develop for the then popular (1998-1999) Sun + Oracle combo -- too big and too expensive for us and most schools at the time). An LMS using a Relational Database may be sufficiently different enough in implementation.
5. The patent differention seems to be at this part:
"The present invention also enhances the prior art by providing a flexible infrastructure for colleges, universities, and other institutions wishing to facilitate on-line registration and tuition payment. More specifically, the present invention can accommodate different billing methods, including, but not limited to, billing on a per-credit-hour basis, and billing on a per-registrant basis."
So, unless you are looking to build a Blackboard clone using a flat-file data management system including an integrated payment system, I really don't see anything to fret about.
(Disclaimer - As I said above, I am not a lawyer, and I certainly would love to see a more sophisticated legal analysis).
I think your institution needs to upgrade. The latest releases of Blackboard are _extremely_ firefox-friendly. The only features which didn't work with firefox in the 6.x releases, so far as I am aware, are the WYSIWYG editor (which I've never made a practice of using, preferring to write good html). All of these features are working in the current 7.x releases. I think you probably need to consult with your system administrators--a rather more limited audience than that afforded by /.--to determine what their upgrade schedule looks like.
I would also point out before this becomes a "Blackboard hates Linux" thread, that Blackboard has always released its product for Linux and I believe most of their hosting business runs on Linux as well.
-- The Sage does nothing, and nothing is left undone. --Lao Tzu
It harkens back to the days when SCO's lawsuits were relevant. SCO filed the lawsuits in Utah, where they had the best chance of winning.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
as a developer working on Sakai at onother school I can tell you that the Sakai Foundation is taking this very seriously and examining the possible effects. There has been a lot of traffic on the lists and people have been contributing to the wikipedia list of prior art. As you can imagine many people involved in Sakai worked on that 'prior art' and are particularly offended by the patent.
In our case we're outside the US in a teritory where this sort of thing is not patentable so we're saffer than most.
Adding my 2 cents. I've been managing Bb installations for two separate institutions for the past three years. One institution took their basic license because they were a small college and didn't have the need, or money, for the higher priced (enterprise) packages.
Since we're dealing with grades and other personal information the first thing I set about was running it over SSL. \
Nope. Can't do it. Blackboard's basic license does not support SSL. You would think it'd be a non-issue. That the communication channel would be separate from the application and one should not impact the other. Turns out that the way links are generated on-the-fly inside Bb will assume a non-SSL channel and return full URLs (http://my.college.edu/...) not relative URLs.
I talked to the Bb rep about this and spent considerable time on the phone pointing out the problem and how it should be a big deal given that they're dealing with private student information. In the end I was told you had to either buy the enterprise license or go without SSL.
So I setup Apache as an SSL proxy to Blackboard. It worked fine and didn't violate the license. But every time I had a problem (and there were many with this POS) the first thing I was told to do was to disable the SSL proxy because they wouldn't operate on it otherwise, even if it was obviously not something related to SSL. Then they'd ask for the admin password so they could login and work on the machine.
So here they are, the company that makes this product, forcing me to allow them to access the administration piece over the internet in cleartext.
The complete lack of care for security continues to this day.
And even on an enterprise licnese there are still problems. For example there are areas where javascript is used to validate certain form fields. The javascript had hard-coded URL strings it would check against. If you were using SSL, this validation would fail and the form wouldn't work because the code was trying to compare "http://...." to "https://....". I had to go in and edit the application myself to correct the bug. It took them 1 month to get a tech to look at the bug and confirm it. Then another month to fix it. Then another 3 months until they finally released a patch that contained the fix.
Oh, and here's a great piece. They're using a third-party PERL interpreter that is no longer being supported as the company that made it went out of business. Well it turns out this particular piece of software is buggy and has a knack for not properly ending strings with a null character so you can to find garbage dumped on your screen from time to time. The recommended solution? Create a scheduled task to restart the services every night. Brilliant.
It's the biggest piece of crap in the business. The only reason it's got any popularity at all is because it was one of the first LMSes and many jumped on to use it. Now they're locked into a buggy system and can't escape. Others then come along and choose the product because there are so many other institutions already using it. And once you're using it you're locked in. Faculty tend to shy away from change and (in my experience) CIOs aren't keen on spending money to help educate faculty, staff and the students on how to use a new product. Even if that new solution is free.
It's a joke. The whole company is a joke.
Why? It's not like there aren't already a lot of highly capable Open Source LMSs out there, some are even written in Java.
Depending on your needs, any of these could work fine. We've been running on Dokeos for the past three years, and although our needs aren't high it's worked quite well.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Moodle IS offshore. Heard of Australia?