It's very much like when BT announced that they had a patent on
hyperlinks and would be charging royalties to anyone who used them.
There wasn't uproar so much as incredulity, and nothing came of it.
This is different because Blackboard have already started to take action
by launching a lawsuit against Desire2Learn; so it's important to scotch
this ridiculous patent before poor D2L gets unfairly hurt.
I recommend that people help out by adding prior art to the wikipedia
article John mentions, especially if you have suitable references to
early papers etc.
Dan
John Norman wrote:
> Some prior art is being collected here:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_virtual_learning_environments
>
> as well as on the Moodle site.
>
> John
>
> On 2 Aug 2006, at 11:10, Wyatt, Tristram wrote:
>
>>
>> From: jetchs [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>> Sent: 02 August 2006 01:09
>> To: Sloan Consortium Mailing List
>> Subject: [sloan-c] Blackboard Patents the LMS
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>>
>>
>> Must be a lot of people on vacation or otherwise occupied, because
>> this is truly big news; so like Michael Feldstein, I'm surprised
>> there hasn't been more uproar about this story that Blackboard has
>> received a patent for the LMS (see also Bb's press release). Of
>> course, as Stephen Downes reports, there are in fact plenty of people
>> upset about this development, including the fact that Bb has already
>> filed suit against Desire2Learn (in eastern Texas, for some strange
>> reason) and is causing concern "about the future of open source
>> initiatives such as Moodle and Sakai" (according to the Academic
>> Commons website).
>>
>>
>>
>> IMO this is a major miscalculation on the part of Blackboard -- if
>> they wanted to become the Microsoft of the LMS world, they will have
>> certainly gained the same level of simmering user resentment; whether
>> they ever attain a comparable market share is more questionable.
>> Their claims of having invented the LMS are silly enough -- yesterday
>> at lunch, a colleague of mine and I were going through the list of
>> LMS-related products we'd already used or researched before
>> Blackboard (Searchlight, Lotus Notes, FirstClass, TopClass, Web
>> Course in a Box), and of course the list is much larger than that.
>>
>>
>>
>> Who it really makes look stupid, however, is the US Patent Office --
>> whatever could they have been thinking?
>>
>>
>>
>> John
>>
>>
>>
>> John Sener
>>
>> Sener Learning Services
>>
>> www.senerlearning.com
>>
>> 301-754-0688
>>
>>
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