Blackboard wins initial round on patent suit damages awarded 3+million
The verdict, announced this afternoon, allows Blackboard Inc. to demand a ban on sales of Desire2Learn’s products in the United States.
[From TheRecord.com – News – Local: Jury rules against Desire2Learn in patent case ]
—-
I cannot help but wonder why this patent has not been invalidated. There has to be innumerable examples of this actually occurring in universities before blackboad, and beyond that, the patent does not seem to be particularly innovative in context, it seems to me to be mapping practices, but hey that’s my opinion, and the court disagrees.
It’s not on practices though, it’s on very very specific technical functions, mostly created by WebCT. If you look through the patents, you’ll see that it’s not so much on practice as it is on these very specific (and not very creative) bits.
I’m not a big fan of the suing thing, but I’ve seen a couple of companies snickering behind their hands as they look to see what Bb does more efficiently than they do and copy it wholesale into their own product. I can understand why Bb gets annoyed.