patent

So Blackboard has lost another battle in its patent war with Desire2Learn. The original patent claims been invalidated by the USPTO and the courts and yet, at the same time, there are still four other fronts open (see the good summary on D2L patent blog).
As things move forward, the question increasingly becomes “what is Blackboard [...]

The Sakai Foundation today issued the following official statement on the new Bb-D2L lawsuit:
As you may have already read, Blackboard has filed a new lawsuit against Desire2Learn for patent infringement. This recent lawsuit is based on a patent that Blackboard was awarded in February (#7,493,396). This new patent is actually a revised version of the [...]

The Blackboard/D2L patent fight seems to entered another chapter in recent weeks. Desire2Learn has recently announced that Blackboard has again brought suit against D2L in Texas.
The basis of this suit is a new patent that Blackboard was awarded recently. The patent isn’t really new but is a continuation patent based on the original one that [...]

Michael Feldstein picked up on some good news on Desire2Learn's blog. The US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process.

This isn’t really an update on the overall progress of the D2L/Bb lawsuit or an update on the USPTO reexamination of the patent, but I was interested, technically, in what D2L would do to its latest version to render it non-infringing.
Basically, they’ve eliminated all roles from their system at the time of installation. The customer [...]

Red Hat settled a patent dispute this week that had potentially wide reaching impact to the open source community. Matt Asay points out nicely that Red Hat has demonstrated the open-source way to quash patent lawsuits.