Impact of the web on eLearning and the Blackboard patent dispute

At Read/Write Web there is a nice discussion on how the web has been a particularly important technology for eLearning (and I would claim for learning, and in many ways). However, it only tantalizes. There are so many initiatives, which originate from or attempt to marry various technologies such as digital libraries, course management systems, interactive learning objects, collaborative systems including wikis, etc.

In the midst of all of this activity, Blackboard announced on July 26, 2006 its newly awarded patent on Learning Management System (LMS). Blackboard, Inc. is the company which recently acquired WebCT and owns its own eponymous Learning Management System product.

From what people are discussing in the blogs, the patent claims are fairly broad, and there is a long history of online learning system prior art (courtesy of Moodle, the open source Learning Management System). This history is also found on Wikipedia’s entry under the History of Virtual Learning Environments. See also the SlashDot posting on this issue, which contributes more to the fray.

On August 18th, Inside Higher Ed reported on the Blackboard patent dispute (with some wonderful commentary in the comments section, including from those quoted in the article). While faulted for being too little, too late on keeping up with the debate, there are some interesting tidbits nonetheless, including from a spokesperson for Blackboard, who stated that:

Blackboard has no plans to challenge open source projects on patent issues, and he said that such challenges “wouldn’t make good business sense” for the company. At the same time, Small declined to directly answer whether Blackboard believes that open source projects are infringing on the company’s patent rights. “No patent holder is under obligation to go out and find infringement wherever it may be,” he said. “We are not focusing on the open source community or the education community.”


But this is misleading. In fact there is a doctrine in patent law that implies that knowing about infringement and not going after it can end up depriving a patent-holder of their rights to pursue infringement claims. Blackboard wants to ignore open source and the anti-patent community, so that it can claim ignorance and keep its options open for legal actions in the future, while it becomes the de facto monopolist. Too late.

However, and from an engineering perspective, we can take comfort from a quote attributed to Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux operating system:

Technical people are better off not looking at patents. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git.

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