Blackboard v. Desire2Learn

Okay, so I was learning all this grand stuff that I wasn't finding anywhere else on the net, and I thought to myself, "hey, isn't that what blogs are for?" So I set this one up. I've been meaning to for a while, and I just never got around to it.

Anyway. For various reasons I've been following the Blackboard v. Desire2Learn case very closely, and actually trying to understand what's been going on. My latest quest has been to figure out what the Desire2Learn workaround is going to be for their recent legal failure -- but I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's the skinny:

Blackboard was granted a pretty crummy patent (I'm not the biggest fan of software patents in general) in January of 2006 that basically says only they can create course management software in the U.S. It's a pretty broad patent, covering things like different roles for different users, online quizzes, digital dropboxes, etc. Since then (and this part is where I've done the least amount of homework) they've been suing or acquiring everybody else in the market. Their biggest competitor was WebCT, which is now part of the Blackboard family of products.

Then recently Canada's Desire2Learn branched out into the U.S. and Blackboard slapped them with a lawsuit (July 26, 2006). The court proceedings have recently wrapped up, with mixed results. Blackboard's patent had 44 claims. Claims 1-35 were invalidated by the court. Claims 2-35 all build on top of claim 1, and the court ruled that claim 1 was too vague. Claims 36-38 stuck, and Blackboard apparently didn't bother pursuing claims 39-44.

Claims 36-38, in case you were wondering, are related to the "digital dropbox" idea. Basically students can submit their assignments by uploading them to the server, the teacher can download these assignments and enter grades based on how well the students did. Pretty straightforward idea.

So Blackboard gained an injunction against Desire2Learn since their product infringes on the patent. Desire2Lean claimed that they had an easy workaround for the patent problem, and I spent a few weeks trying to figure out what exactly that workaround was. I couldn't find anything, so I finally caved and read the legal mush. Now that I know the sticking point is only those three claims, 36-38, it's not hard to conceive of a workaround. What exactly they did is up for debate, of course, but this whole time I was thinking it was a problem with user roles when that had been shot down from the beginning. Go figure.