More Blackboard Spin Control

Two new things appear on the Blackboard Patent Info page. The first is a second page of FAQs where they clearly are speaking to some of the information (they say it is misinformation of course) from the blogosphere. The second item is a transcript and comments from an interview between BB counsel Matthew Small and Paul Bacsich, Member of the ALT Board of Trustees (Association for Learning Technology) in the UK.

On the BB page, they talk down to the audience rather severely and often.
  • "A common misunderstanding is that the description in the abstract or specification governs what the patent covers. Focusing on the wrong section of the patent can be misleading and has caused some people to think that the Blackboard patent covers all of e-learning. To properly understand any patent, you must do a careful phrase-by-phrase reading of the claims."
  • "This detailed element-by-element analysis is necessary to evaluate the scope of the patent. Be wary of any analysis of this or any other patent which does not involve an element-by-element discussion of the claims as each element is a limitation on the scope of a patent."
  • "The inherent complexity of patent law is no doubt a leading cause of confusion about the Blackboard patent. ... We believe that an important first step is for all participants to have a common understanding of the Blackboard patent and patent law in general."
See, they're just a bunch of educators trying to help out the uneducated masses.

In the interview, Small states:
  • "While falling outside a patent only involves falling outside of the independent claims, invalidating a patent is much more difficult. It involves a showing that the patent is invalid “by clear and convincing evidence” (a very high standard of proof), rather than merely “by the preponderance of the evidence” (a lower standard of proof)."
  • "Blackboard believes that, in the case of Patent 6988138, the architecture of Blackboard’s products is irrelevant (i.e., the patent is technology neutral). Thus if alleged prior art existed in a different paradigm, Blackboard would want to know about it. That said, Blackboard has not taken its action lightly, having spent months doing due diligence and infringement analysis prior to instigating court action against Desire2Learn. It sees the Wikipedia History of VLEs as a great compendium, but not as a threat. Certainly, if there is prior art out there relating to the independent claims in the patent, then Blackboard is keen to know of it."
  • "Desire2Learn is a commercial competitor of ours in the US. We believe Desire2Learn infringed our patent. We believe that discovery and the legal process will show clearly what transpired. We believe that in such circumstances a company like Blackboard should be able to do something to protect itself."
They are quickly on their way to becoming the most hated vendor in high ed. Not that they care.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed2Go is NOT Higher Education

Image
For several years now I have railed against the use of ed2go courses when they are affiliated with a college or university. During my time on the Minnesota Online Council I was especially adamant against the listing of the ed2go courses at the MnOnline website as though they were endorsed courses from a member institution. There is no way that I think the brand should be diluted by including courses like this in our offerings. Why not? Glad you asked. NOTE: most of this post was written after I discovered that my own school had recently signed on with ed2go. This saddens me to no end since I spent the past five y ears railing against the use of ed2go in Minnesota Online and our colleges. Our VP in that division assures me that they will do what they can to not harm our reputation for quality online offerings - and I believe that, I'm just not sure how much of that we can actually control. I waited a couple of weeks before posting this to see whether my opinion would be changed by
Read more

Another Switch from Blackboard to Desire2Learn

Image
As many of you know, I am always interested in the comings and goings of the LMS wars. Who's leaving Blackboard and what are they going to? I rarely have to ask the opposite question - who's migrating to Blackboard from a non-Blackboard platform - because it almost NEVER happens. The latest one to catch my eye was the University of Surrey in the UK. Here's their press release about choosing D2L . Nowhere in the release do they mention what platform they've been on - but it doesn't take much effort to find this on their current website: So, yes, this is another school switching from Blackbeard to Desire2Learn. I find portions of their press release to be revealing about their previous experience with BlackCT Vista. "A new hi-tech system is being introduced at the University of Surrey to enable students to learn on computers and mobile devices via a more personalised platform ." "The new Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), replacing and vastly improving
Read more

Distance Education and Reauthorization

Image
The Committee on Education and Labor in the U.S. House of Representatives passed the "College Opportunity and Affordability Act" (H.R. 4137 ) on November 15, 2007. This means we are nearing the end of the long road leading to reauthorizing the Higher Education Act (HEA). The House committee bill now joins the bill passed by the U.S. Senate (S.1642) in July 2007. House link: H.R. 4137 , go to part H, section 496-A Senate link: S. 1642 , go to part G, section 491 (formerly 496) At some point the language differences between the House and Senate will need to be hammered out. However, with regard to accreditation concerns for distance education, the House committee bill is identical to the Senate bill. The current language would allow college and university accrediting agencies to address the quality of a school’s distance education offerings without the need to create separate standards, procedures or policies related to distance education (for a while this looked to be the dire
Read more