Blackboard Wins Patent Suit Against Desire2Learn 186
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)."
Yes... That's What America Needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
This one particular line almost made me vomit from my eyeballs: 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... Semantics notwithstanding, is it really even slightly plausible that a company focused on education would want to crush anyone else attempting to teach people?
Once Again (Score:4, Insightful)
This is standard Database Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
What other general concepts shall we patent in narrower contexts? How about patenting the basic concept of parent child relationships in Cinema Seat allocation software. It could get quite ridiculous.
Why patent laws needs to change ... NOW (Score:4, Insightful)
Patent reforms need to start NOW, or else it'd be too late and by then we (the general populace) would be too powerless to stop it.
They didn't patent the crapness (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a place where patents really suck: a good idea gets sat on and cannot be used by people would could make into something good.
Re:Yes... That's What America Needs... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:3, Insightful)
The patenting of basic ideas when applied to specific problem domains massively threatens open source, small software houses and innovation in general. These patents have to be killed ASAP.
They do not always win... (Score:5, Insightful)
A few years back, we had Blackboard on our campus. It was horrible and I refused to use it [Techie aside: Take a look at some of their JavaScript, it is bloated and beyond ugly]. However, someone persuaded the students that Blackboard was a wonderful thing. So much so, that their organizations petitioned the administration to make Blackboard mandatory for all classes. I don't know if the student leaders were bribed, but it would not surprise me -- it is sad to say how easily some people can be bought for the price of a couple of pizzas.
The students proposed a 'Blackboard is mandatory' motion that went through all the relevant committees. Fortunately, the Faculty Senate were rational enough to amend the motion to advocate not just Blackboard, but also 'equivalent technologies'. This left the way open for people to even use simple web pages.
Then the next thing you know is that Blackboard suddenly wanted a HUGE amount of money for the new version -- much more money than we could ever afford. The techs basically told them to go to hell, kept on using the older version while they could and began to experiment with Moodle. As one of of the more technically sophisticated people on our campus, I was one of the beta-testers for our Moodle implementation. It is always a fun job trying to break software! Although early versions of the implementation had quite a few rough edges, pretty soon, Moodle was up and running in a slick manner. Thus, for a short time, we actually had both versions. Also during this period, negotiations with Blackboard continued, largely without much progress. Eventually their greed was too much. Blackboard was just scrapped. It was not just the cost of the software, but also the hardware requirements that were ridiculous, which killed the system for us. We have now moved entirely to Moodle, which is doing very well, even if a few people were initially unhappy about the change. Hopefully, more schools will be inspired by the predatory nature of the Blackboard people to get that monkey off their collective backs.
In a final irony, just before the decision was made to pull the plug on Blackboard was made, one of my students demonstrated to me a method by which he could crack Blackboard and change the grades of assignments with relative ease. The main point here though is that behaving like bastards can ultimately have a business cost. I say to hell with Blackboard, support Moodle instead -- after all, it is open source!
Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is why the patent should be thrown out.
Patents were intended to give the patentholder exclusive control over the use of a method for a limited period of time. Methods can cover a lot, but in the end they should be specific. In the Olde Days, patent applicants were required to submit prototypes of their inventions.
If the end result of the patent is to fence off a concept and not an implementation, then the patent itself is, I think, invalid.
.edu loses, .com wins (Score:3, Insightful)
Prior art was out there (including from the company I worked for), but neither Desire2Learn nor the educational community provided enough organizational will and competence to find it and kill this patent lawsuit. I personally spent hours of my time gathering prior art evidence as well as soliciting teachers and developers to help fight this. After tepid responses from both sides (including a form-letter sent one month later from Desire2Learn), I shrugged and walked away.
Hopefully this doesn't affect open source LMSes such as Moodle or Sakai, but if it does then the EDU community has only itself to blame for not stepping up to the plate.
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is, that sort of purchasing decision almost always gets made much higher up, or even at the state level. That's also why you also see SunGard/Banner all over the place.
Re:They do not always win... (Score:2, Insightful)
1) It takes an unbelievable amount of time and money to sell something to a school board or university. Like, at least a year and many thousands of dollars in expenses even for the most insignificant sale.
2) Once you have a customer, you have to make that money back by milking them for years before you turn a profit.
Educational software sucks. It sucks because its users are not the people who decide what to buy, and their needs or desires are definitely not at the top of the list when the bureaucrats make the decision on what to buy. It has to be incredibly expensive because selling it to those bureaucrats is incredibly expensive.
Blackboard sucks to use. Everyone knows that. But it is perfectly tuned to make money in its niche.
Re:Polymorphism (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, I believe patents (not just software patents) shouldn't exist full stop (due to both economic and ethical reasons I won't go into here), but software is exceptionally problematic due to its nature - IF you allow patents on software, it is _necessary_ that patents be on the "idea" at some level, because idea/method is not a dichotomy in software, it's a spectrum.
Re:They do not always win... (Score:3, Insightful)
Blackboard's licensing fees are usually per-faculty, rather than per student, or flat size-of-institution-based. So, a VP of IT, CTO, etc., has a hard time justifying the purchase to trustees when only 20% of the faculty uses it.
I don't know your institution's case, but most of the time, mandating use of Blackboard is an attempt by higher-ups to justify its high cost.
I knew a graduate student who was Oracle certified and got SELECT access to the Blackboard DB at his school. He wrote his thesis in educational technology on how most courses that were "using" Blackboard were only using it to post syllabi and other mundane documents, mainly so departments could shift printing costs to the students. In other words, the bulk of the work Blackboard was doing could be done much more efficiently by free (or low-cost commercial) software.
No one in the administration listened to him.
Re:As a blackboard victim/user..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They didn't patent the crapness (Score:4, Insightful)
Software patents and those who thrive upon them must be exterminated from society, progress is infinitely more important than money.
Re:Blackboard sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
Good lord you should hear the bitch sessions at my departmental meetings. Teachers hate it, but despite the university having tons of money, because of some budget stupidity, the budget that pays for this kind of thing is too small to get a commercial piece of software. Now that BB has bought WebCT, which was my favorite, maybe we will forever have to make due with it.
What the hell is the deal with the "weeks/topics" organization? Why is there nothing else available?
Why does the page reload every time I make a change? Why can't I make a bunch of changes and then hit "Save" or something? Every time I update my class, I have to block off an hour.
Why do I have to push an "Edit" button? Why don't I see the edit functions when I log in? I'm the teacher!
Why doesn't the "course reset" actually reset the course? Why can't it basically just purge any data that I didn't put in? I always have to go back through all of the glossaries and quizzes and hand-remove tons of stuff.
Related, but if I want to run a quiz again (like the following semester), I almost always have to re-make it because even if I only want to change one question, it says "people have already taken this quiz; you can't change it." Actually, why the hell would that matter? It's my quiz! I'm the teacher! If I want to change the rules of the game before everyone has had a chance, I'm an ass, but ultimately, it's my class and I can do whatever I want. I don't need the software telling me what's ethical and what's not. I just want it to display things on browsers.
No WebDAV support.
Ugly ugly ugly and no way around it.
My department once hired a student to go through and make a bunch of forums for discussing various books (like 50+ possible) because it was so time consuming that we'd rather fork over the money for some kid to sit there and be bored for a couple hours than do it ourselves. That's how awful it is. You would rather spend your research budget on someone else doing it than do it yourself for free.
And feature requests. To whom do you send them? It's open source, so if you want it to do something, you will have to learn to program and make it do it yourself. You know, on top of teaching classes and doing research and applying for PhD programs and going to pointless meetings and trying to have a life outside of that as well. Yeah, I'm going to add "learn a new trade" onto that so I can get this damned thing to do what I want. Ugh.
Moodle sucks and everyone knows it. OSS works well for things that a lot of people like, use, and are interested in. No one seems too keen on LMSes, and that means that Moodle is kind of neglected.