well…
The blackboard patent fun continues. The first email i sent to the company to invite them to our meeting this weekend bounced back at me. I’ll continue to try and contact them. I was reading through ‘an explanation of the CMS patent‘ on their website (notice the use of the term CMS (course management system) as the one used by moodle) Anyone who is not in the US and thinks this is a US only issue might want to reconsider. The following from the Blackboard website.
- What other countries are covered by the patent?
Patents corresponding to the U.S. patent have been issued or are pending all over the world including in the European Union, China, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand India, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil. - updated THIS IS THE ONE WAITING TO BE ISSUED IN CANADA
There are also many people in the community who have suggested that the ‘bad press’ that will come out of this will be bad for Blackboard inc. I would also ask that they reconsider their position. If someone has managed to secure a monopoly ‘bad press’ is not very relevant. Those of us who are familiar with the University CMS/LMS/VLE decision making process know that a secure solution is a VERY important part of that decision making process. If we can’t guarantee that it will be legal to use a given product, how can we guarantee the longevity of that product. Blackboard wins either way… all they need is the suggestion that they might sue…
The third thing that I am reading is that people are suggesting that this is an opportunity to move beyond the CMS into a brave new world of online education. It’s important to remember that the ‘series of tubes’ argument coupled with DOPA would make that difficult for many educators. However, i must agree, it is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity for many agendas. It’s also an opportunity for those who have been resistant to the change to dig their heels in and point to this situation as a reason to stick to old ways of teaching.
Following my blog post yesterday… we’re going to cover three things on Sunday over at edtechtalk (link above). What is going on? What can we do to stop it? What do we do if we can’t stop it?
dave
I run this site... among other things.
by Giulia Forsythe.
I agree Dave – I think ‘bad press’ is not much of a deterrent when state sanctioned usurpation of the CMS/LMS market it at stake. I will reserve final judgment until we’ve heard more about the legal and substantive issues involved, but from what I’ve read so far, this patent seems quite illegitimate.
As negatively as this effects my opinion of Blackboard, I am even more disturbed by the actions of the Patent Office. Aside from the dubious specific claims these ‘thought leaders’ at Blackboard make, how can something as broad as “Internet-based education support system” even be considered for a patent. I really think the entire patent system needs to be rethought. There an interesting discussion with Beth Noceck of such possibilities here on IT Conversations
I fear that this specific case is only the latest in a growing trend of traditional commercial forces using patents and aggressive legal threats to reduce competition they face from open source products and the internet fueled global movement toward collaboration. Since the societal benefits of innovation and openness seem so apparent, I’d like to think that global collaboration will eventually triumph, but it certainly won’t happen without a coherent, sustained, multi-faceted response to these detrimental actions of some businesses and some governments.
For me, this case seems like an excellent place to start building that response. My greatest source of hope in this particular case is the Post Grant Review of Patent Claims that provides one year (after patent issue) for 3rd parties to raise some kind of objection. Would love to more about this possibility from those who are more knowledgeable about the technical and legal issues involved. Aside from that, I think our community response should make it very clear to Blackboard and the patent office how people in our community, who represent a variety of edtech related roles, feel about this decision and its potential effect on the world of online learning.
[...] http://davecormier.com/edblog/?p=67Â [...]
(I have commented similarly on Stephen’s Web and Seb Schmoller’s Fortnightly Mailing) Blackboard’s major shareholders include Federated Investors, the Carlyle Group and Oak Hill Capital Partners. These firms are very close to the Whitehouse and are among the biggest corporate and individual donors to the Republican Party and the Bush family. Although I usually favour cock-up to conspiracy, the Bb patent skirmish is, maybe, an important little battle in the hearts-and-minds war. Read here: http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/. And, that “rural East Texas Jurisdiction” in which the suit against D2L was filed is, possibly, part of the game.
[...] I’m pleased to see the concerns and objections growing about Blackboard’s overbroad patent on Course Management Systems. While I was Director of Distance Learning at Eastern Oregon University I first became involved with Blackboard when the company bought out the CMS we were using, Web Course in a Box. EOU became an involuntary Blackboard customer. As I noticed Blackboard’s yearly fees increase I sought an open source alternative and persuaded EOU to begin running Moodle as a trial system and alternative to Blackboard. Unfortunately when I retired, in June 2004, the institution returned to using Blackboard as its sole provider of online and hybrid course delivery (a dangerous entanglement). My own experience with Course Management Systems goes all the way back to the mid-60s and early 70s when course managment systems were used with mainframes and terminals. PLATO was just one of the successful systems that was developed before the development of the personal computer. From the perspective of decades of work on computer-aided instruction, it seems outlandish and absurd to me that any company could lay claim to a general patent on course mangement methods, they might just as well claim a patent on learning with computers (or books). _____JH _______ Stephen Downes has assembled a collection of comments and links about the Blackboard situation. Here’s a sample: Bill Fitzgerald – Blackboard Granted Patent on Series of Tubes. Keeping up with the discussion on the Blackboard patent as Bill Fitzgerald gives us our headline of the day (via McToonish).Alfred Essa reports that he has contacted EFF “to see if we can get the Blackboard Patent listed under the Patent Busting Project” and advises “if any readers have connections to the EFF, let’s get this on their radar.” He also cites Brad Fell on abolishing software patents.Dave Cormier continues to try to pull together an online meeting on the issue (but his emails to Blackboard are bouncing) and meanwhile has posted the link to the proposed Canadian patent. But even if Blackboard representatives don’t show, it might be a good idea to be in on the Sunday Ed Tech Talk meeting and to let your voice be heard.The Wikipedia page of prior art, mentions Feldstein, is gaining steam. Get your contributions in. He also references James Farmer’s patent information page in his eLibrary, but it was so slow as to be unreadable.Trey Martindale offers a short remark and links to the Slashdot discussion. Not surprisingly, the Slashdotters are not amused. As guisar writes, “I hope that not only are these patents denied but that Blackboard and WebCT get tied up in litigation until they go Chapter 11. If any market should be supportive of Open Source, I think the on-line learning marketplace is a natural. Having Blackboard and WebCT dominate is not good for us.” Now there’s some publicity money just can’t buy.Scott Leslie, who was on holiday when the story broke (hey, at least you weren’t in Bogota!) comments “If you can beat them, sue them, eh?” He lists some prior art and adds, “at Edutools we can actually show a continuous development of the feature set that we use to compare these products from 1996 until our current one.”Meanwhile, ATS Blog cites a Moodle discussion and comments, “It is sometimes disturbing to watch the trends in e-learning in the United States vs. Australia, Canada, or Europe.”On Desire2Blog Barry Dahl writes, “Earlier I said I was not a hater. Oops, turns out that I HATE Blackboard.” Heh. Michael Feldstein (who showed up with comments in a locked-down Chronicle article today) links to Blackboard’s new defensive FAQ and asks “is Blackboard feeling the heat already?” At least the Chronicle covered it – the rest of the education press – University Business, Insider Higher Ed, eSchool News, all of them, are missing in action.There were also short posts from Rich Schweir, Robert Paterson, Will Richardson, George Siemens and Graham Attwell.One competitor that appears to be relatively unscathed by the fray is the open source product ELGG. Joan Vinall-Cox writes, “I believe that this is the corporate system about to topple from its own weight. I teach using an Elgg Community blog and a course wiki. I used to use WebCT. I prefer the blog and wiki as teaching tools; they’re simpler to use, much, much cheaper, and students learn how to use software they might encounter again in their futures.” And Harold Jarche notes that ELGG does not contain any of the 44 features claimed in the Blackboard patent.I have wonder whether it wasn’t really the best time for NIIT to acquire Element K. Heh. [Link] [Tags: Push versus Pull, Wikipedia, Online Learning, Canada, Web Logs, Blackboard, Copyright and Patent Issues, European Union, United States, Open Source, Games and Gaming] [Comment] [Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ OLDaily RSS 0.91] [...]
Thanks, this article help me understand about patent.