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Patently Offensive
11/1/2006
By Terry Calhoun
Could there be any clearer evidence that the United States patent system is dysfunctional, than the patent awarded to Blackboard? Well, yeah, if you look at the filings, they can get pretty absurd. And now there are whole companies that have never done anything and they’re buying up old patents and finding new ways to clobber people with them.
But this one hits close to home, so we in higher education don’t have to look any further. We know about the history of course management systems: It is our own history. And now Blackboard thinks that it owns it. (But we don’t have to worry because it likes universities and nonprofits. Whew!)
I once interviewed then-Blackboard CEO Matthew Pittinsky for the newsletter of a now-defunct association of Internet professionals. I remember walking into a big, grey Washington, DC building, past the offices of Mitsubishi of America, and entering the Blackboard lobby, which had a foosball table and several, red beanbag chairs, plus a dry-erase board on the wall charting the number of institutions that had at that time at least one faculty member who had adopted Blackboard for use in a course. The numbers were still in double digits.
I’ve watched Blackboard since even before that visit, as well as its commercial competitors and the various open source (Sakai) and proprietary versions. It is patently ridiculous and offensive to the brain to imagine Blackboard legitimately owning a patent that would limit the option for others to implement the basics of course management systems. We all participated in the development of this product. When I visited Blackboard HQ, I didn’t see anyone who looked older than high school age. The whole early business model was clearly predicated on getting users to use it for free and in so doing being participants in the development of the functionality, bringing their maturity and expertise to bear on the development of the tool. As one recent Campus Technology article puts it:
Nearly all of today’s commercially available Learning Management Systems started off as homegrown university systems that were later commercialized. For example, Blackboard started at Cornell University, WebCT [now merged with Blackboard] at University of British Columbia, and Desire2Learn at University of Waterloo. If a group on your campus wished to develop an LMS today, what would be your legal advice on the matter?
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