Bloggasm

Gauti Sigthorsson’s Concept Bin points out that Blackboard has successfully patented the combination of a bunch of programs that have already been invented (email, message boards, chat, etc..), and have now issued a law suit against their nearest competitor:

Blackboard, the owner of WebCT, the cumbersome monolith of Learning Management Systems, has been granted a patent on the very idea of merging email, web, chat software and secure hierarchical access into a single enterprise system, for use in training or education. Having been granted the patent in the US, Blackboard promptly sued its rival Desire2Learn, claiming that the latter owes them royalties.

Surprise! Academics, including myself, are furious. ABC News has a good summary of the instant, hostile reaction by the academic community, an extensive Wikipedia entry has been assembled on the prior art of Virtual Learning Environments - arguing that key inventions in the field, including the development of the original Blackboard system at Cornell University, firmly belong to the intellectual commons and have been developed for decades in an environment fostered by public funding.

As Sigthorsson points out, this has caused a backlash against Blackboard, including one University that has stopped using it because of the lawsuit. I used Blackboard when I went to college, and though at first I didn’t like it, I came to eventually use it on a daily basis. In fact, it saved me a few times when there was an assignment due and I had lost my syllabus. But patents like this are incredibly harmful because they block people from doing common sense things, just because they didn’t patent it. If I were to create a site tomorrow that sells both dish rags and computer parts, should I be able to patent the joint sale of dish rags and computer parts so other webmasters can’t do the same thing? Of course not! The case is silly, and I would hope that any professors reading this will immediately stop using Blackboard and switch to their main competitor immediately.