Tag Archives: Desire2Learn

Appellate Court Overturns Blackboard Patent

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Blackboard’s patent on learning management system technologies has been overturned by the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. The court ruled Monday in favor of Desire2Learn and invalidated some claims in patent No. 6,988,138, also known as the “Alcorn patent” or the “138 patent.”

[…] Blackboard made concessions to the open source community, releasing a legally binding pledge that it would never assert its patent claims against an open source developer, among other things. The pledge fell short of the SFLC’s demand for Blackboard to renounce the patent, however, and the move was greeted with a mixture of relief and continued outrage at Blackboard’s unwillingness to drop its suit against Desire2learn and unwillingness to renounce the patent claims.

Glad to see that an appellate court overturned Blackboard’s patent of Learning Management Systems. It will be interesting to see how Blackboard’s patent for “technology used for Internet-based education support systems and methods” is finally resolved.

Read the full Campus Technology article by David Nagel

Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn

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Posted by kdawson on Monday February 25, @06:58PM
from the that’ll-learn-’em dept.

Patents Education

edremy writes “Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn’t think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it’s been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard’s pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding).”