Comments on: Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/ Learning & Working on the Web Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:19:19 -0300 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Harold Jarche » USPTO to re-examine Blackboard patent filing http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-63660 Harold Jarche » USPTO to re-examine Blackboard patent filing Fri, 26 Jan 2007 17:20:17 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-63660 [...] suit against competitor Desire2Learn, has been widely reported. Here’s an overview of the patent application as well as a subsequent comparison with Elgg’s functions that I did last [...] [...] suit against competitor Desire2Learn, has been widely reported. Here’s an overview of the patent application as well as a subsequent comparison with Elgg’s functions that I did last [...]

]]> By: Harold Jarche » Popular posts in 2006 http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-47841 Harold Jarche » Popular posts in 2006 Wed, 27 Dec 2006 03:03:34 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-47841 [...] Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent (Aug 2006) [...] [...] Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent (Aug 2006) [...]

]]> By: Harold Jarche » Choose your bedfellows carefully http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-16644 Harold Jarche » Choose your bedfellows carefully Wed, 25 Oct 2006 23:20:26 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-16644 [...] Anyone in the learning technology space knows about Blackboard’s greedy grab for intellectual property that was originally created by the community (yes, the initial suit is against D2L, but will open source be next?). And now along comes Oracle into the open source space and tries to squeeze Red Hat out of the enterprise Linux market, as reported by Matt Asay. [...] [...] Anyone in the learning technology space knows about Blackboard’s greedy grab for intellectual property that was originally created by the community (yes, the initial suit is against D2L, but will open source be next?). And now along comes Oracle into the open source space and tries to squeeze Red Hat out of the enterprise Linux market, as reported by Matt Asay. [...]

]]> By: NhanTran Education News » Blog Archive » Blackboard Patents Learning! http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-10040 NhanTran Education News » Blog Archive » Blackboard Patents Learning! Sat, 09 Sep 2006 21:13:53 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-10040 [...] I’m pleased to see the concerns and objections growing about Blackboard’s overbroad patent on Course Management Systems. While I was Director of Distance Learning at Eastern Oregon University I first became involved with Blackboard when the company bought out the CMS we were using, Web Course in a Box. EOU became an involuntary Blackboard customer. As I noticed Blackboard’s yearly fees increase I sought an open source alternative and persuaded EOU to begin running Moodle as a trial system and alternative to Blackboard. Unfortunately when I retired, in June 2004, the institution returned to using Blackboard as its sole provider of online and hybrid course delivery (a dangerous entanglement).  My own experience with Course Management Systems goes all the way back to the mid-60s and early 70s when course managment systems were used with mainframes and terminals. PLATO was just one of the successful systems that was developed before the development of the personal computer. From the perspective of decades of work on computer-aided instruction,  it seems outlandish and absurd to me that any company could lay claim to a general patent on course mangement methods, they might just as well claim a patent on learning with computers (or books).  _____JH _______ Stephen Downes has assembled a collection of comments and links about the Blackboard situation.  Here’s a sample: Bill Fitzgerald - Blackboard Granted Patent on Series of Tubes. Keeping up with the discussion on the Blackboard patent as Bill Fitzgerald gives us our headline of the day (via McToonish).Alfred Essa reports that he has contacted EFF “to see if we can get the Blackboard Patent listed under the Patent Busting Project” and advises “if any readers have connections to the EFF, let’s get this on their radar.” He also cites Brad Fell on abolishing software patents.Dave Cormier continues to try to pull together an online meeting on the issue (but his emails to Blackboard are bouncing) and meanwhile has posted the link to the proposed Canadian patent. But even if Blackboard representatives don’t show, it might be a good idea to be in on the Sunday Ed Tech Talk meeting and to let your voice be heard.The Wikipedia page of prior art, mentions Feldstein, is gaining steam. Get your contributions in. He also references James Farmer’s patent information page in his eLibrary, but it was so slow as to be unreadable.Trey Martindale offers a short remark and links to the Slashdot discussion. Not surprisingly, the Slashdotters are not amused. As guisar writes, “I hope that not only are these patents denied but that Blackboard and WebCT get tied up in litigation until they go Chapter 11. If any market should be supportive of Open Source, I think the on-line learning marketplace is a natural. Having Blackboard and WebCT dominate is not good for us.” Now there’s some publicity money just can’t buy.Scott Leslie, who was on holiday when the story broke (hey, at least you weren’t in Bogota!) comments “If you can beat them, sue them, eh?” He lists some prior art and adds, “at Edutools we can actually show a continuous development of the feature set that we use to compare these products from 1996 until our current one.”Meanwhile, ATS Blog cites a Moodle discussion and comments, “It is sometimes disturbing to watch the trends in e-learning in the United States vs. Australia, Canada, or Europe.”On Desire2Blog Barry Dahl writes, “Earlier I said I was not a hater. Oops, turns out that I HATE Blackboard.” Heh. Michael Feldstein (who showed up with comments in a locked-down Chronicle article today) links to Blackboard’s new defensive FAQ and asks “is Blackboard feeling the heat already?” At least the Chronicle covered it - the rest of the education press - University Business, Insider Higher Ed, eSchool News, all of them, are missing in action.There were also short posts from Rich Schweir, Robert Paterson, Will Richardson, George Siemens and Graham Attwell.One competitor that appears to be relatively unscathed by the fray is the open source product ELGG. Joan Vinall-Cox writes, “I believe that this is the corporate system about to topple from its own weight. I teach using an Elgg Community blog and a course wiki. I used to use WebCT. I prefer the blog and wiki as teaching tools; they’re simpler to use, much, much cheaper, and students learn how to use software they might encounter again in their futures.” And Harold Jarche notes that ELGG does not contain any of the 44 features claimed in the Blackboard patent.I have wonder whether it wasn’t really the best time for NIIT to acquire Element K. Heh. [Link] [Tags: Push versus Pull, Wikipedia, Online Learning, Canada, Web Logs, Blackboard, Copyright and Patent Issues, European Union, United States, Open Source, Games and Gaming] [Comment] [Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ OLDaily RSS 0.91] [...] [...] I’m pleased to see the concerns and objections growing about Blackboard’s overbroad patent on Course Management Systems. While I was Director of Distance Learning at Eastern Oregon University I first became involved with Blackboard when the company bought out the CMS we were using, Web Course in a Box. EOU became an involuntary Blackboard customer. As I noticed Blackboard’s yearly fees increase I sought an open source alternative and persuaded EOU to begin running Moodle as a trial system and alternative to Blackboard. Unfortunately when I retired, in June 2004, the institution returned to using Blackboard as its sole provider of online and hybrid course delivery (a dangerous entanglement).  My own experience with Course Management Systems goes all the way back to the mid-60s and early 70s when course managment systems were used with mainframes and terminals. PLATO was just one of the successful systems that was developed before the development of the personal computer. From the perspective of decades of work on computer-aided instruction,  it seems outlandish and absurd to me that any company could lay claim to a general patent on course mangement methods, they might just as well claim a patent on learning with computers (or books).  _____JH _______ Stephen Downes has assembled a collection of comments and links about the Blackboard situation.  Here’s a sample: Bill Fitzgerald – Blackboard Granted Patent on Series of Tubes. Keeping up with the discussion on the Blackboard patent as Bill Fitzgerald gives us our headline of the day (via McToonish).Alfred Essa reports that he has contacted EFF “to see if we can get the Blackboard Patent listed under the Patent Busting Project” and advises “if any readers have connections to the EFF, let’s get this on their radar.” He also cites Brad Fell on abolishing software patents.Dave Cormier continues to try to pull together an online meeting on the issue (but his emails to Blackboard are bouncing) and meanwhile has posted the link to the proposed Canadian patent. But even if Blackboard representatives don’t show, it might be a good idea to be in on the Sunday Ed Tech Talk meeting and to let your voice be heard.The Wikipedia page of prior art, mentions Feldstein, is gaining steam. Get your contributions in. He also references James Farmer’s patent information page in his eLibrary, but it was so slow as to be unreadable.Trey Martindale offers a short remark and links to the Slashdot discussion. Not surprisingly, the Slashdotters are not amused. As guisar writes, “I hope that not only are these patents denied but that Blackboard and WebCT get tied up in litigation until they go Chapter 11. If any market should be supportive of Open Source, I think the on-line learning marketplace is a natural. Having Blackboard and WebCT dominate is not good for us.” Now there’s some publicity money just can’t buy.Scott Leslie, who was on holiday when the story broke (hey, at least you weren’t in Bogota!) comments “If you can beat them, sue them, eh?” He lists some prior art and adds, “at Edutools we can actually show a continuous development of the feature set that we use to compare these products from 1996 until our current one.”Meanwhile, ATS Blog cites a Moodle discussion and comments, “It is sometimes disturbing to watch the trends in e-learning in the United States vs. Australia, Canada, or Europe.”On Desire2Blog Barry Dahl writes, “Earlier I said I was not a hater. Oops, turns out that I HATE Blackboard.” Heh. Michael Feldstein (who showed up with comments in a locked-down Chronicle article today) links to Blackboard’s new defensive FAQ and asks “is Blackboard feeling the heat already?” At least the Chronicle covered it – the rest of the education press – University Business, Insider Higher Ed, eSchool News, all of them, are missing in action.There were also short posts from Rich Schweir, Robert Paterson, Will Richardson, George Siemens and Graham Attwell.One competitor that appears to be relatively unscathed by the fray is the open source product ELGG. Joan Vinall-Cox writes, “I believe that this is the corporate system about to topple from its own weight. I teach using an Elgg Community blog and a course wiki. I used to use WebCT. I prefer the blog and wiki as teaching tools; they’re simpler to use, much, much cheaper, and students learn how to use software they might encounter again in their futures.” And Harold Jarche notes that ELGG does not contain any of the 44 features claimed in the Blackboard patent.I have wonder whether it wasn’t really the best time for NIIT to acquire Element K. Heh. [Link] [Tags: Push versus Pull, Wikipedia, Online Learning, Canada, Web Logs, Blackboard, Copyright and Patent Issues, European Union, United States, Open Source, Games and Gaming] [Comment] [Stephen’s Web ~ by Stephen Downes ~ OLDaily RSS 0.91] [...]

]]> By: Harold Jarche » LMS circa 1999 http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-8978 Harold Jarche » LMS circa 1999 Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:47:31 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-8978 [...] I’ve picked a few of the functions out of the tables to highlight how many other commercially available systems were on the market at the time. These had all been in production and on the market for several years. You will note that many had functions that Blackboard claims were unique to its system in 2000. Note that Blackboard was known as CourseInfo at the time. [...] [...] I’ve picked a few of the functions out of the tables to highlight how many other commercially available systems were on the market at the time. These had all been in production and on the market for several years. You will note that many had functions that Blackboard claims were unique to its system in 2000. Note that Blackboard was known as CourseInfo at the time. [...]

]]> By: Harold Jarche » Elgg and the LMS http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-8380 Harold Jarche » Elgg and the LMS Mon, 21 Aug 2006 15:51:43 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-8380 [...] Alfred Essa asked this question on my post, Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent: I am not sure where Jarche gets the notion that Elgg Learning Landscape is “not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit.” As I noted in a recent posting, “Blackboard’s “invention” describes a generic learning system and a corresponding set of methods. The “44 claims” cover any system which supports students interacting with instructors in an online course setting. Interaction simply means the manipulation (read, write) and exchange (asynchronous, synchronous) of data files. It’s that simple. It’s also frighteningly comprehensive because it can be interpreted to cover not only learning management systems but standalone tools such as blogs, wikis and online chat when used in the context of a course. The patent could also be interpreted by the courts to cover any other elements (e.g. e-commerce engine, card systems, ERP connectors) that integrate with the basic system.” [...] [...] Alfred Essa asked this question on my post, Blackboard Sues D2L over LMS Patent: I am not sure where Jarche gets the notion that Elgg Learning Landscape is “not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit.” As I noted in a recent posting, “Blackboard’s “invention” describes a generic learning system and a corresponding set of methods. The “44 claims” cover any system which supports students interacting with instructors in an online course setting. Interaction simply means the manipulation (read, write) and exchange (asynchronous, synchronous) of data files. It’s that simple. It’s also frighteningly comprehensive because it can be interpreted to cover not only learning management systems but standalone tools such as blogs, wikis and online chat when used in the context of a course. The patent could also be interpreted by the courts to cover any other elements (e.g. e-commerce engine, card systems, ERP connectors) that integrate with the basic system.” [...]

]]> By: Alfred Essa http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-8370 Alfred Essa Mon, 21 Aug 2006 13:36:57 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-8370 I am not sure where Jarche gets the notion that Elgg Learning Landscape is "not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit." As I noted in a recent posting, "Blackboard's "invention" describes a generic learning system and a corresponding set of methods. The "44 claims" cover any system which supports students interacting with instructors in an online course setting. Interaction simply means the manipulation (read, write) and exchange (asynchronous, synchronous) of data files. It's that simple. It's also frighteningly comprehensive because it can be interpreted to cover not only learning management systems but standalone tools such as blogs, wikis and online chat when used in the context of a course. The patent could also be interpreted by the courts to cover any other elements (e.g. e-commerce engine, card systems, ERP connectors) that integrate with the basic system." Please explain why you think Elgg is not covered. I am not sure where Jarche gets the notion that Elgg Learning Landscape is “not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit.” As I noted in a recent posting, “Blackboard’s “invention” describes a generic learning system and a corresponding set of methods. The “44 claims” cover any system which supports students interacting with instructors in an online course setting. Interaction simply means the manipulation (read, write) and exchange (asynchronous, synchronous) of data files. It’s that simple. It’s also frighteningly comprehensive because it can be interpreted to cover not only learning management systems but standalone tools such as blogs, wikis and online chat when used in the context of a course. The patent could also be interpreted by the courts to cover any other elements (e.g. e-commerce engine, card systems, ERP connectors) that integrate with the basic system.”

Please explain why you think Elgg is not covered.

]]> By: elgg.org :: the learning landscape http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-7423 elgg.org :: the learning landscape Fri, 11 Aug 2006 18:24:07 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-7423 [...] Harold Jarche went even further and on review of the patent found out that: "On reviewing these 44 items, I would say that Elgg Learning Landscape does not use any of these. So, I guess that makes your decision easy. Choose Elgg if you want a lawsuit-free learning system ;)" [...] [...] Harold Jarche went even further and on review of the patent found out that: “On reviewing these 44 items, I would say that Elgg Learning Landscape does not use any of these. So, I guess that makes your decision easy. Choose Elgg if you want a lawsuit-free learning system ;) ” [...]

]]> By: Harold Jarche » Elgg Reviewed by R/WW http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-7401 Harold Jarche » Elgg Reviewed by R/WW Fri, 11 Aug 2006 13:40:34 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-7401 [...] Read/Write Web has a good overview of Elgg Learning landscape and an interview with Dave and Ben, the co-founders. [I had mentioned that I believe that Elgg is one of the few online learning systems that is not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit, though there are other Blackboard patents that may be a cause for concern]. [...] [...] Read/Write Web has a good overview of Elgg Learning landscape and an interview with Dave and Ben, the co-founders. [I had mentioned that I believe that Elgg is one of the few online learning systems that is not affected by the current Blackboard LMS patent suit, though there are other Blackboard patents that may be a cause for concern]. [...]

]]> By: Bryan Ledford http://www.jarche.com/2006/08/blackboard-sues-d2l-over-lms-patent/comment-page-1/#comment-6277 Bryan Ledford Fri, 04 Aug 2006 05:55:32 +0000 http://www.jarche.com/?p=840#comment-6277 The real problem here is that the USPTO isn't doing their job. Overwhelming incomptence. The real problem here is that the USPTO isn’t doing their job. Overwhelming incomptence.

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