I’ll start with the correction. In returning to David Jakes’ post from a few days ago I saw a comment from a reader of my blog saying that he thought I’d made an unfair representation of David’s position. While i did say that i agreed that the patent office had dropped the ball, I forgot to include this text…
- I think Mark Oehlert gets it right in his post title about the situation, appropriately entitled “LMS Patented!! Is anyone home at the Patent Office?†(my emphasis)
Shouldn’t we be blaming the patent office for allowing the patent? Isn’t Blackboard, Inc. just taking advantage of what is available to them as a corporation?
above my third comment… which, in retrospect, makes David’s position much clearer. He’s saying (I guess) that if fault their is, it lies in the system. A publicly traded corporation must, by its structure, take advantage of every legal opportunity. And it is the fault of the patent office for offering this legal opportunity. I’m not sure i agree, and i’m not sure that it counters the majority position taken up in the edubloggosphere, but I apologize for not fully representing his position. (As Cory Doctorow says, that’s the great advantage of blogs
- Blogs, Wikipedia, and other online media fail gracefully indeed. When a newspaper gets a story wrong, it can take 24 hours to get a correction out – if it corrects it at all. There’s no ready way to link criticism of a newspaper article with the article itself. Certainly, you can’t make the edits yourself.
Props to Stephen Downes for highlighting the fact that this is not exactly the first time that educators (and edubloggers) have been talking about this for a while in response to the claim of some edubloggers that the community has been sitting idly by ignoring patents until a few weeks ago.
I would very much like, speaking of edubloggers, to get a community activity together for creating that page on wikipedia. Should be pretty simple, all we need to do is go there and create the page. The problem is, my creations have been getting deleted lately, (the first ones i’ve made) and i’m thinking i’ll need more people around to make it happen. Anyone interested…? (Not like i’ll be obsessively checking the page or anything)
We’re ramping up our edu-projects for the fall over in the worldbridges community. We’re being much more careful about how much we take on this year, but if you are interested in taking part, drop by on of our shows , come to the edu-elgg or send us an email.
A publicly traded corporation must, by its structure, take advantage of every legal opportunity.
As I understand it, a publicly traded corporation has a duty to maximize shareholder value. If taking advantage of an legal opportunity damages the corporation’s reputation and causes it to lose business, that action could represent a management failure.
Note that (some) corporations spend lots of money on charities and environment-oriented programs that, in their face, remove money from the bottom line, but foster the image of that company as a good corporate citizen.
A good example is Apple’s recent announcement of a recycling program for old computers. That’s going to cost Apple lots of money in the short term, but (Apple hopes) will increase profit in the long term by improving Apple’s reputation.
Blackboard has managed to piss off a sizeable proportion of its core customers. That can’t be good for business.
Jeez, I never thought I’d get so much heat, indirect as it may be, for pointing out that I can’t really rouse myself to care about a rather obviously important issue. I guess it depends on if being “jaded” is a compliment or insult.
Koschei,
I’m not sure that there is any proof that blackboard has ‘pissed off its core customers’. To my knowledge, few people in the edublog community are actually paying blackboard anything. Many administrators are probably blissfully unaware of this situation or, if they’ve recently chosen blackboard, are probably feeling like they made the safe choice. Until i see a few ‘this university left blackboard ’cause they’re pissed off’ i will remain unconvinced. And most people don’t do business that way.
Hey Tom,
Now… I removed your name from that post because i didn’t want to single you out! 🙂 You have to admit Tom, your post was a little argumentative. As the comments on your blog attest, an inference was read into your post that you were jaded BECAUSE you have been aware of it longer. It’s a weakness of text, it’s essentially transmission based, no matter how much we interact after the fact.