Friday, August 18, 2006

Inside Higher Education's Coverage of the Blackboard Patent Controversy The title of IHE's online article is "Blackboard: Bully or Misunderstood." (Of course this title opens them to a long series of parodies of the "bully or misunderstood" theme.) There are already follow-up online comments at the site about the article by Michael Feldstein, Stephen Downes, and others that criticize the reportage for failing to adequately cover the issues and fully present the ramifications of the Blackboard claims. From my perspective, the best news reported in the text is that the Sakai Foundation has emerged as a critic of the Blackboard patent. If universities and foundations begin to widely oppose Blackboard's actions, then the company will feel a backlash to their patent efforts that will hurt their bottom line. Another hoped-for line of opposition may emerge from major companies with a stake in online learning systems (such as Oracle)--companies with much larger capitalizations than Blackboard could cause them them major legal problems. A big bully-on-bully fight would potentially reverse the patent contest, ending up with Blackboard paying other companies rather than extracting payments from them. _____JH _______ "On Thursday, leading advocates for open source systems of course management announced that they were linking up with the Software Freedom Law Center to try to prepare legal and other defenses for attacks they fear will be coming from Blackboard. 'The recent announcement by Blackboard that it is attempting to assert patent rights over simple and longstanding online technologies as applied to the area of course management systems and e-learning technologies, and its subsequent litigation against a smaller commercial competitor constitutes a threat to the effective and open development of software for higher education and the values underlying such open activities,' said the announcement from the Sakai Foundation, which helps dozens of colleges and universities run open source course management systems."   7:45:14 AM    COMMENT []