In late July, the US Patents and Trademark Office issued a patent to Blackboard Inc. for technology used for internet-based education support systems. The patent covers core technology relating to online education, including course management systems and enterprise e-learning systems. Blackboard’s patent is number 6,988, 138 and is titled ‘Internet-Based Education Support System and Methods’.
This patent’s technology underpins Blackboard’s e-learning applications including WebCT Vista, WebCT Campus Edition and Blackboard Learning System.
What concerns many in the e-learning business is that many of the things covered by this patent were already in common use before Blackboard filed their original application back in 1999.
Corresponding patents have already been issued in Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, with the application still pending in many jurisdictions including the EU (Blackboard’s EU office is in the Netherlands but they have a sales office in the UK).
If the US patent is upheld and the new ones granted, it could damage the open source movement in education, particularly Sakai and Moodle which are competitive LMS/CMS. Beyond this, the incredibly wide scope of the patent may even restrict the use of wikis and blogs by educational institutions and other rival software companies. The Sakai Foundation are just one of several US organisations who are working with the Software Freedom Law Centre to challenge this patent.
Blackboard, the US e-learning market leader, launched a patent infringement case in Texas against Desire2Learn, one of their major competitors, based in Canada. Blackboard’s aggressive stance in defending this patent has heightened fears in the education community, who worry that they may end up having to agree to expensive and restrictive licensing agreements with Blackboard rather than fighting them in court.
Ironically for Desire2Learn, Blackboard only became the market leader after they merged with another Canadian company WebCT in 2005. Both were also recent sponsors of the UK Association for Learning Technology’s (ALT) conference in Edinburgh.
In an August teleconference between Blackboard and ALT, one Blackboard representative described the rationale behind seeking worldwide patents as, ‘We live in a world where we are at risk from others who hold patents, and if we do not hold them ourselves, others will and may use them against us’. Aside from the obvious irony, this sounds eerily like Jack Nicholson’s character Col. Nathan R. Jessup in the film A Few Good Men when he says, ‘Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded..’. It’s also the same sort of thinking that gave us the prospect of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) during the Cold War.
