USPTO Rejects Blackboard Patent Claims

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USPTO Rejects Blackboard Patent Claims

3/28/2008

By David Nagel

You can read more about the new version and Desire2Learn's e-learning strategy in relationship to the patent in the following articles from earlier this month:

John McLeod, Desire2Learn's director of marketing, added, "What this [decision represents] is something great for the entire industry. Desire2Learn said all along, 'We'll stand up for everyone.' This result is good for everyone, not just Desire2Learn."

You can find out more about Desire2Learn's involvement in the patent case and decision by visiting its Patent Information Blog here.

SFLC: 'This Patent Is Dead'
Desire2Learn isn't the only one claiming victory with the USPTO's action this week. Eben Moglen, founding director of the SFLC and a partner in Moglen Ravicher LLC, spoke with us this afternoon as well, saying that the decision reinforces what his organization has been saying all along: that the Blackboard patent was wrong from the outset and should never have been granted. The SFLC represents free and open source software developers, such as Sakai; Moglen Ravicher, which just launched this week, represents for-profit clients "that support FOSS but are not eligible to receive SFLC's pro bono services." Moglen himself has been outspoken about software patents in general and has, in the past, gone head to head with Blackboard on the issue of this patent in particular. (You can find out more about that here.)

"This is a step in a procedural road," Moglen said. "There will be other procedural steps and other days. But I think from the point of view of the final outcome, the days that are going forward are not likely to change today's result. This patent is dead."

He added, "We have succeeded not only in saying what needed to be said; we have succeeded in allowing the Patent Office to say it for us. [The] opinion by the Patent Office adopted our objections to the patent as proposed and adopted by incorporation by reference our claim chart." (Moglen pointed out that it was the SFLC's Richard Fontana who actually filed the ex parte reexamination.) "The patent claim chart is the key analytical document in relation to the entire reexam, and by adopting our claim chart by reference the patent examiner was saying, 'You see, everything SFLC says about this patent's content and its relation to the prior art is exactly right. So we have nothing more to say [to the Patent Office]. We are exactly right, and the Patent Office has declared that because we are exactly right there is no single claim in the Blackboard patent that survives. Every single part of the Blackboard patent was obvious, as we said.