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. "

Comments

ANother example

[teflaime]

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.

WebCT

[mwilliamson]

This is the same company that recently acquired WebCT, which was probably their biggest commercial competitor. They have plans to "merge" the Blackboard and WebCT product line, but they're so different I suspect they're just going to kill one off and concentrate on the other.

I've just lost a lot of respect for these guys with this patent BS. Long live Moodle!

As a manager of a college's Open Source CMS

[edremy]

I'll be interested in what they can actually do. We use Dokeos, which is headquartered out of Belgium. They don't have a lot of penetration in the US and I can't imagine the EU holding this patent valid, so I'm going to ignore this entirely. Moodle is out of Australia and the press release indicates a corresponding patent has already been issued there and it does have a lot of folks in the US using it. Sakai will be the real test, since they are totally US based.

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.

Re:Prior art=all content management systems

[The_REAL_DZA]

If you can patent:

• Frames
• Exercising your cat
• Swinging on a swing
• Interacting with your computer
• unique innovations in astrological tarot and in alpha-numerology

then you probably could jam-through a patent for just about anything

Re:A side note about the infringement lawsuit

[kansas1051]

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.

In a logical world, you'd expect the lawsuit to be filed where one or the other of the companies has its HQ.

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).

I'm actually at the D2L user's conference now...

[citking]

...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! :)

Overblown patent scare

[aricusmaximus]

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).

Linux support: WAS: Re:It's not just the patent...

[DoktorMel]

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.

Re:The real reason they're trying to patent this.

[edremy]

This annoyed a lot of people, so much in fact, that the IS department faculty have started an initiative to code a new one, from scratch, in Java.

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.