The silence is deafening
OK, it’s been nearly eight hours since I received my email about Blackboard’s Patent Pledge, in which it seems Blackboard pledges not to sue folks for patent infringement if they develop their own course management system. I’ve been checking my edtech feed all day and I’ve yet to read anything about it. In contrast, when the patent application was announced, nearly every mailing list I was on and many edtech blogs couldn’t stop talking about it.
What gives?
February 2nd, 2007 - 5:30 am
Dude, you need to read better blogs.
Bloglines and Google Blogsearch are both showing over 300 hits on “blackboard pledge”
http://www.bloglines.com/search?q=blackboard%20pledge
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=blackboard%20pledge
I don’t think they’re all talking about chalkboards and furniture polish.
February 2nd, 2007 - 9:08 am
I think I yawned and clicked “next feed item”. Maybe it means they figured out it’s only worth suing people with assets., but reading the “pledge” I hardly got a warm and gushy feeling about it.
February 2nd, 2007 - 12:20 pm
Dude, the difference is that the bloggers I normally read were all riled up over Bb’s patent filing, but now nothing on the pledge. I’m not denying that it’s being written about elsewhere.
I didn’t thing much of it either, Alan, after reading reactions from the Sakai folks.
February 3rd, 2007 - 2:16 pm
I didn’t make a big deal out of it because Bb is dead to me. They are irrelevant, and any pledges they make simply don’t matter. Stephen Downes made an incredibly astute observation that the Pledge is designed to fracture their opposition, rather than doing anything meaningful to the community. If Moodle et. al. are all satisfied that they won’t be sued, the opposition to the patent is reduced.
But, the patent is still invalid, with lots of prior art identified. A Pledge to not enforce an invalid patent is just plain silly. Not worth the paper it’s written on.
September 27th, 2007 - 10:41 pm
The question of who owns what in the world of intellectual property & inventions is a daunting one. A very useful site for researching what each inventor claims to own is www.wikipatents.com” rel=”nofollow”>www.wikipatents.com. Not only can users view the text of patents, but they can also comment on the validity and scope of the claims of inventors, and also cite relevant prior art that may have been overlooked by patent examiners at the USPTO. It’s a very interesting site!