BlackBoard patent infringement suit

The Washington-based company BlackBoard is trying to use software patents as weapons to litigate their competitiors into submission. The world of on-line education is up in arms. More Info (Note that some of the statements made by BlackBoard representatives in this article have been denounced as FUD without any basis in reality)

Short recap

BlackBoard Inc. (the dominant provider of e-learning software in the online-education market, after they acquired two other education-technology companies, Prometheus and WebCT) was granted a very broad US patent in January 2006, covering pretty much all the aspects of a common virtual learning environment. They are trying to get the patent accepted world wide. If they get away with it, it means that BlackBoard will have the monopoly of the eLearning market. A breakdown and translation of the claims in the patent.

Nobody seemed to have noticed the patenting process, even during the period in which people or organisations can protest against the patent (naturally, BlackBoard kept it under wraps). However, as soon as the waiting period was over, BlackBoard announced that they now had the patent and would enforce it retroactively (I believe until 1997, the year the company was founded). http://www.blackboard.com/patent/patentpress.htm

The very same day BlackBoard filed a patent infringement suit against the Canadian eLearning provider Desire2Learn, which presently is BlackBoard's major competitor in North America. The suit was filed in a rural Texas court (one can assume that BlackBoard figures that it will be easier to get their way with a bunch of nationalist hayseeds on the jury, no offence intended). Text of the suit: http://www.theinquirer.net/images/articles/blackboard.pdf

Reaction

The outcome of this law suit will have an important impact on eLearning. It is therefore of interest to follow the procedure and to take action against the monopolisation of eLearning by one commercial giant. http://www.boycottblackboard.org/index.php

The open source community is gathering evidence of prior art, so as to prove that BlackBoard did not invent most of the functionality they have now patented (See and contribute to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments and/or http://docs.moodle.org/en/Online_Learning_History or http://www.desire2learn.com/patentinfo/)

This litigation once again shows that software patents are not conducive to the development of fair and open standards in eLearning and we should support the European Parliament in its opposition to such patents. Support: http://flosse.dicole.org/?item=don-t-allow-software-patents-to-threaten-technology-enhanced-learning-in-europe and http://noedupatents.org/