Patent Fight Over Online Schooling

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Justin Pope[Edit][Delete]: Patent Fight Over Online Schooling, Business Week [Edit][Delete] August 28, 2006

Business Week has discovered the Blackboard patent fight and in a typically one-sided article attempts to depict the fight as being between Blackboard and "the academic computing community, which is fighting back in techie fashion -- through online petitions and in a sprawling Wikipedia entry that helps make its case." Blackboard is given credit for an invention (though it is characterized as "obvious" and "incremental") although it should not be (even Blackboard's "obvious" and "incremental" developments were discovered prior to its claim). The 'market' is described as entirely occupied by commercial products, which is simply false ("Blackboard has about 60 percent of the market for those systems, followed by eCollege and Desire2Learn with about 20 percent each, according to Eduventures"). More...