CALIOPOLIS

News of BlackBoard’s pledge is still pinballing around the blogpsphere. I subscribe to a stored search for the term ‘blackboard patent’ and it retrieves dozens of blog posts every day since they made the Pledge. The great majority of these posts have not been positive or grateful to BlackBoard. I have really been trying to […]

Read all about here. I’m still digesting, but a couple of things pop out. Last week, after the news that the USPTO had agreed to re-examine the ‘138 patent, the number of blogs and news sources that ran the story was huge and noisy. They want to own the commercial CMS market. I haven’t read […]

Like so many ed-tech folks who are not lawyers, I have been struggling to understand the implications of the BlackBoard patent and their law suit against Desire2Learn. Being in the legal education business, I happen to know some really smart law professors who teach patent law and so I am in the process of recording […]

Matthew Small, BlackBoard’s General Counsel is quoted today in aChronicle for Higher Education article (subscription required)… "…"We don’t claim to have invented the course management system," saidMatthew Small, senior vice president and general counsel forBlackboard. "This is about specific functionality."…" That’s correct, they don’t and some of the hyperbole about their lawsuit has been over […]

Inside HigherEd has recently posted an article about the BlackBoard patent issue and in it BlackBoard’s General Counsel Matthew Small opines… "…Blackboard has no plans tochallenge open source projects on patent issues, and he said that suchchallenges “wouldn’t make good business sense” for the company…" That’s great to hear, but it seems that BlackBoard is […]

I went in search of information that would help me understand howthe BlackBoard v. Desire2Learn case might play out and want to sharethe results of my research with you. It is important to point out that I am not a lawyer and that none ofwhat I write or say should be interpreted as legal advice […]

I have been following the reaction to the BlackBoard patent closely and I am struck by the fact that I can’t find anyone defending BlackBoard’s actions. I have seen some people explain why they understand that patents are important and why they think BlackBoard feels compelled to patent their work, but I haven’t seen a […]

Back in 2000, I was reserching content management systems for a legal aid website project I was working on and did some pretty heavy digging into ArsDigita’s ACS system. (that might be redundant as I believe the ‘S’ stands for system). Anyhow, this system was developed by Phillip Greenspun of "Phil and Alex’s Guide to […]

The Inquirer had a story today about Rambus’ run-in with the Federal Trade Commission. "…THE US FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION (FTC) is to file an antitrust case against Rambus Inc, a company which licenses its intellectual property to others.The basis of the case, according to commissioners, is that Rambus allegedly persuaded the JEDEC standards group to […]