Blackboard "Really Cares"

That title just seemed like such a nicer way of saying that BLACKBOARD SUCKS! But then again, there's nothing newsworthy about that. It's pretty hard to find anyone that doesn't think that Blackboard is really a terrible corporate citizen - except of course for those Turnitin-haters like me who think Bb is the second-worst higher ed vendor in existence.

The D2L blog reports that Blackboard filed a Motion for Contempt in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. They (D2L) say that they learned about it first from a reporter. Is that anything like when a baseball manager hears that he's been fired from his job by watching SportsCenter? I'm thinking it's pretty similar.

As Michael points out, Blackbeard apparently coordinated their filing announcement so that they would get maximum online press coverage with articles appearing in at least three online news sources at basically the same time.

According to the Chronicle article: "Diane M. Lank, Desire2Learn's general counsel and director of legal affairs, said in an interview on Tuesday that the company remains confident that the new version does not infringe Blackboard's patent. "We took great pains to study their expert's testimony and so forth and make sure that we were far away from how they thought that we were infringing," she said."

Matthew Small of Blackboard (interesting comment about him at IHE,) says that D2L is "totally flouting the court order" by making only cosmetic changes to their new version. The judge in Texas clearly thinks that Blackboard is in the right on all of this crappola, so I expect this to get worse for D2L before it gets better.

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