Educause asks Blackboard to drop Patent
Laura Blankenship October 27th, 2006
Inside Higher Ed reports today that Educause, a nonprofit organization that promotes effective technology use in education, has sent a letter to Blackboard asking them to drop the patent they recently had approved over the summer. (A good summary can be found here.) Many have said that the patent will prevent innovation in educational technology. From my limited experience (4 years) in this field and reading blogs by leaders in the field, it also seems to violate the kind of open sharing and communication that has existed for years. As many of us are the only instructional technologists on campus, we need to share information and tools with each other in order to be successful. We can’t do this alone.
Blackboard has sued Desire2Learn for patent infringment already. A web site trying to fight against the patent by proving that other online learning applications existed prior to Blackboard (prior art) has been established. It has pointed to such resources as the EFF’s Patent Busting Project, aimed at finding patents that have a profound effect on innovation and to begin challenging them.
This whole situation is reminiscent of Microsoft’s wrangling with the Justice Department over 10 years ago. Sure, Microsoft survived that, but even regular users of Microsoft products often recognize that it participates in some ugly business practices and for many years, was basically a monopoly. And that’s where, in my opinion, Blackboard is headed. It bought WebCT, so it is now a giant among proprietary course management systems. The question is, what will it do about budding open source projects like Sakai and Moodle? Will those projects decrease development out of fear of being sued? Is that the kind of atmosphere we want educational technology to function in? I don’t think so.
Nice post, Laura. In answer to your question about budding open source systems like Sakai and Moodle decreasing development out of fear of being sued, the answer is a resounding “no way!” We are working with the Software Freedom Law Center to go after this silly patent and remove it and the FUD surrounding it. We think it is a bad patent, invalid on its face, and should never have been granted by the USPTO. See the recent posts on this at (http://sakaiproject.org/bbPatentUpdate1.html).
I also look upon this as an amazing opportunity to educate the higher ed and online learning communities on the problems such patents present and hence applaud your article. I think the next stage of the discussion will really be about what community defense mechanisms we can put in place to protect the free movement of ideas and innovation in our educational software environments. Articles like yours lay the groundwork for this larger discussion. Thanks and keep up the good work.