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Blackboard Patents the LMS…The End of Moodle and Elgg?

August 1, 2006 By Will Richardson

Dave Cormier just Skyped me with a link to this article that details the patents on learning management systems that were just awarded to Blackboard. By the looks of it, Blackboard now owns learning management systems. The day the patent was awarded, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn for infringement, and although the Moodle board doesn’t seem to indicate a great deal of panic, I’d be interested to know what people in this community make of this. Dave says it’s not good…here is his depressing Skypequote:

“DOPA takes all the open sites, and Blackweb all the closed ones…”
Oy.

technorati tags:Moodle, DOPA, learning, Blackboard, education

Filed Under: Connectivism, Moodle

Comments

  1. gnz says

    August 1, 2006 at 2:48 pm

    Hopefully this means that Blackboard will accelerate the development on their upcoming “Social Studies : How to Exploit Capitalism in the Information Age” module—the patent lawyers of tomorrow are aching for it!

  2. Tim Lauer says

    August 1, 2006 at 4:16 pm

    You really have to wonder about the folks in the patent office… Has anyone ever heard of prior art…

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLATO

  3. Chris Lehmann says

    August 1, 2006 at 9:07 pm

    *arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh*

  4. Michael Penney says

    August 1, 2006 at 11:56 pm

    I’m not a lawyer, but if the patent is upheld in it’s broadest sense, a patent on all online learning with a teacher/student role, it seems to me that MS (Sharepoint), IBM (Lotus Learning), Oracle, and Apple (iTunesU) will all be out of the game.

    On the other hand, there is a good deal of prior art, which folks are busy updating here:
    History of VLEs

    The suit against D2L appears to over selling VLE code, which (again, INAL), what injury is there to BB if an institution which can’t afford BB Enterprise uses a free product for their VLE?

  5. Mary Striby says

    August 2, 2006 at 2:15 pm

    So the patent office has created a monopoly for online learning systems? How is that legal?

  6. zeb says

    August 2, 2006 at 6:04 pm

    It’s about as the monolopy Moodle has created…which is legal. I would suspect that Blackboard isn’t really interested in the Moodle open source community, but is more interested in the Moodle.com business monolopy.

    http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=48528

  7. dave cormier says

    August 2, 2006 at 9:25 pm

    Someoene has been posting this link to the ‘steve hyndman’ issue all over the internet and not leaving any name along with it. I would love it if whomever posted this would identify themselves.

    calling what moodle.com is doing as a monopoly is rediculous. Martin D. is saying that if you want to sell services, with moodle, you have to talk to him about it. I’ve not really seen any argument that convinces me that they are doing anything wrong. I am willing to be contradicted, but as the person who keeps posting that link (also posted on downes today) without ID, it seems more like a smear campaign.

  8. Gary Stager says

    August 3, 2006 at 12:38 pm

    Since learning cannot be “managed,” I remain unconcerned.

    Now, if 14th Century priests would just enforce their patent on “smart” boards…

  9. Alwyn Hugo says

    August 7, 2006 at 5:22 am

    Does the patent BB have extents to code, procedures or processes? Code I can understand but if it is upheld to include code that are used to achieve a similar product / process we will see patents on Word processors and Spreadsheets…. If it extents to procedures and processes then BB now owns the WebInternet and further have the right to tell Institutions of Learning how and what to teach.

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