December 2006 — News
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Blackboard, SFLC Go Head to Head at Sakai Conference
"We are not looking to put Desire2Learn out of business," he said. "We think it's healthy competition, and we're seeking a reasonable royalty. The goal of Blackboard is not to impede innovation, [not to] stop sharing. We want collaboration; we want to grow the community of practice; we want to partner with open source...." He also reiterated, as we previously reported, that Blackboard is not targeting Sakai and that it does, in fact, want to support Sakai's efforts. He said the suit is "not part of a larger campaign. It's just between us and Desire2Learn—certainly not the open-source community."
The SFLC's Moglen referred to this as "fluff," warning members of the audience at the event not to accept Small's reassurances at face value.
The role of proprietary software in education
Aside from discussing Blackboard's e-learning patent in particular, Moglen and Small also presented their views on the role of proprietary software in education.
"[Proprietary software] plays a very valuable role, as evidenced by the rapid adoption," Small said. "The rest of the world is coming on quickly. K-12's coming on quickly."
Not unexpectedly, Moglen, who's organization represents open-source clients, took a radically different view:
"Its role is to slowly disappear, along with ownership of teaching materials and textbooks and the other forms of unfree culture, which have temporarily become important in the university built around the industrial reproduction of information.
"When information is contained in industrial artifacts that have non-zero marginal costs and which can't be indefinitely copied at no expense in transport or friction, it is necessary to have some structure for recouping the costs of production. In a world of free or mostly frictionless transportation of knowledge where the marginal cost of knowledge reproduction is zero, the appropriate price is zero, and the appropriate method of production is by sharing."
More background
Blackboard says it filed its patent back in 1999 and had it approved this year by the USPTO only after discussions with the USPTO, making changes to the initial application in order to accommodate prior art. Blackboard came under fire from the education community when, in July, it used that patent as the basis for an infringement suit against rival Desire2Learn. In response, individuals and organizations have urged Blackboard to relinquish its patent, and some have created blogs, Web sites and even a Wikipedia entry showing examples of prior art to invalidate Blackboard's claim. In addition, last month the SFLC filed a request with the USPTO to reexamine the claims in Blackboard's patent. The USPTO has 90 days to make a decision as to whether a reexamination will take place.
We will, of course, keep you updated as this issue progresses. See the links below for further information on this ongoing story.
