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Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn
edremy writes "Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."
More obstacles between people, and learning.
This one particular line almost made me vomit from my eyeballs: You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn... Semantics notwithstanding, is it really even slightly plausible that a company focused on education would want to crush anyone else attempting to teach people?
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Patents assisting innovation, just like they were intended for.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I've seen "multiple role" examples in various database books going way back. It's not rocket science. This patent is just taking a basic concept and saying that it a narrower context than the general example, it's patentable. It's like saying you can't have a headteacher object inheriting all the features of the basic teacher object in a teaching application, because we have patented the idea.
What other general concepts shall we patent in narrower contexts? How about patenting the basic concept of parent child relationships in Cinema Seat allocation software. It could get quite ridiculous.
We can be digested by all ridiculous patent stories on slashdot and yet we can still laugh at them becuase most of the time we are not directly affected by it. However, as ridiculous and terrible as most software and business patents are, they will be NOTHING compared to the next big trend in patents--genetics/DNA engineering. When some soulless companies in the future robbed people of a cure for a genetic diease because somehow they claim to 'invent' it, I bet most of us won't be laughing.
Patent reforms need to start NOW, or else it'd be too late and by then we (the general populace) would be too powerless to stop it.
Here's a place where patents really suck: a good idea gets sat on and cannot be used by people would could make into something good.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A few years back, we had Blackboard on our campus. It was horrible and I refused to use it [Techie aside: Take a look at some of their JavaScript, it is bloated and beyond ugly]. However, someone persuaded the students that Blackboard was a wonderful thing. So much so, that their organizations petitioned the administration to make Blackboard mandatory for all classes. I don't know if the student leaders were bribed, but it would not surprise me -- it is sad to say how easily some people can be bought for the price of a couple of pizzas.
The students proposed a 'Blackboard is mandatory' motion that went through all the relevant committees. Fortunately, the Faculty Senate were rational enough to amend the motion to advocate not just Blackboard, but also 'equivalent technologies'. This left the way open for people to even use simple web pages.
Then the next thing you know is that Blackboard suddenly wanted a HUGE amount of money for the new version -- much more money than we could ever afford. The techs basically told them to go to hell, kept on using the older version while they could and began to experiment with Moodle. As one of of the more technically sophisticated people on our campus, I was one of the beta-testers for our Moodle implementation. It is always a fun job trying to break software! Although early versions of the implementation had quite a few rough edges, pretty soon, Moodle was up and running in a slick manner. Thus, for a short time, we actually had both versions. Also during this period, negotiations with Blackboard continued, largely without much progress. Eventually their greed was too much. Blackboard was just scrapped. It was not just the cost of the software, but also the hardware requirements that were ridiculous, which killed the system for us. We have now moved entirely to Moodle, which is doing very well, even if a few people were initially unhappy about the change. Hopefully, more schools will be inspired by the predatory nature of the Blackboard people to get that monkey off their collective backs.
In a final irony, just before the decision was made to pull the plug on Blackboard was made, one of my students demonstrated to me a method by which he could crack Blackboard and change the grades of assignments with relative ease. The main point here though is that behaving like bastards can ultimately have a business cost. I say to hell with Blackboard, support Moodle instead -- after all, it is open source!
Well, my prediction back in 2006 was way off.
Prior art was out there (including from the company I worked for), but neither Desire2Learn nor the educational community provided enough organizational will and competence to find it and kill this patent lawsuit. I personally spent hours of my time gathering prior art evidence as well as soliciting teachers and developers to help fight this. After tepid responses from both sides (including a form-letter sent one month later from Desire2Learn), I shrugged and walked away.
Hopefully this doesn't affect open source LMSes such as Moodle or Sakai, but if it does then the EDU community has only itself to blame for not stepping up to the plate.
I worked in College IT for a time, and we hated it too.
Problem is, that sort of purchasing decision almost always gets made much higher up, or even at the state level. That's also why you also see SunGard/Banner all over the place.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
When I went to university, all we had was the Professors webspace. And we liked it. Do we really need anything more complicated? Or is this a solution in search of a problem? A lot of professors I had didn't even use the webspace. We seemed to do fine without it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.