Alan Levine posts another company's patent claim that could spell trouble for Blackboard's claim. See http://cogdogblog.com/2006/08/04/earlier-patent/ .

In the event you haven't read the patent filing on this so-called "invention" by Blackboard, I strongly encourage you to do so: Click Here The filing date for the patent is June 30, 2000 and I find many of the statements regarding this invention to be mindboggling. One would think that role based access to content is an invention by Blackboard engineers "during the 90's"... I can remember that Wesleyan had role based access to student and faculty information even as early as 1996. Forgot to check with the Blackboard engineers who seemed to have spent over $100 million towards this invention! I blame the US Patent office as much as Blackboard for this utter nonsense. Knowing what I know about how hard it is to get patents for medicines (for a good reason), this looks foolish and silly. My guess is, if Gore wrote up a proposal with all the buzzwords, he might have received a patent for inventing the Internet... I wonder what criteria/expertise was used by the patent office to validate if these claims were true at the time the patent was filed. How do they go back 6 years? Even so, who in their right mind would award a patent for these outrageous claims till 2022? As a consumer of Blackboard, I felt deeply disappointed that they would ask us to upgrade the onecard system to the community system in a way that gave us no choices but to spend a fair amount of money. Now, this comes along... Looks like they are on a path to alienate their customer base... May be the outrage over this will result in something that sends a strong message to Bb; Maybe this is the moment that Moodle and Sakai proponents want to seize; Maybe that Bb's patent certificate #6,988,138 will go the way the Enron stock certificates did... Just for fun, I wanted to see some of the other patents that have been issued and the Bb patent pales in comparison. For example, there is one for Inexpensive computer-aided learning methods and apparatus for learners and one for Method and apparatus providing electronic concurrent delivery of multimedia content to general purpose computers over a computer network. Go to the search page and put in their respective patent numbers of : 6,685,478 and 7,007,073. (When I tried to put in the direct access URL, I saw some formatting errors perhaps due to special characters in the URL confusing the url parsing scheme of academiccommons interface). I picked these randomly because the it doesn't make sense as to why one needs to protect these ideas through patents and how exactly does one enforce the protection? May be there is something in this that I am not seeing, just like I don't see the merit of the Bb patent... In the end it boils down to the US Patent office playing a huge part in all of this and the lack of information on how they go about awarding these patents doesn't help much either...

One interesting question that I have about all of this is: who would Blackboard sue if it decided that Sakai or Moodle were infringing on their patent? And if it was decided that these open source products did in fact contain modules that infringed on Blackboard's patents, how would this play itself out on individual campuses that had adopted these products? Would they have to stop running the software?

See: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33396