Open letter to Blackboard: $1M to charity if you drop patent litigation | Hacker News Reader

Open letter to Blackboard: $1M to charity if you drop patent litigation

desire2learn.com

87 pointspaulgb55 comments

I'd dig deeper on this one. When a company says "we will donate $X to schools", they often mean the notional retail value of their products. My high school computer class was drowning in donated AOL floppies, MS Office licenses, and copies of the soundtrack to Gigli.

It's carpet bombing, basically. Maybe the kids benefit, maybe not, but they are being used in a distasteful way.

Good point, but judging from this I think they are talking about cash:

"$1,000,000 from Desire2Learn can make a significant difference for thousands of students through the purchase of laptops, technology, supplies and other much needed educational support."

That is a good point. If they wrote out the check or put it in escrow, that would make the case even stronger.

Let's assume they mean $1M cash. This is an awesome move. Our legal system really needs an overhaul. So little value is created in suits like this and so much time and resources are poured into them. Kudos to them.

I speak from not much, but some experience after suing a corporation(very reluctantly) and being sued personally.

We've worked for Blackboard in the past. They make more from lawsuits and extorted "license fees" than product easy. Its my hunch that the "product" is just there to prop up the patent crap.

They've already paid Blackboard $3.3M (with the idea that they'll get the money back on appeal)?

"On another note, we've reached an agreement with Blackboard, and yesterday wired $3,313.552.40 to it, in full payment of the judgment (and post-judgment interest) awarded by the Court. These funds will be returned to Desire2Learn if and when the judgment is reversed."

http://www.desire2learn.com/patentinfo/

Meant to upvote, not downvote, sorry. Upvoting 2 other of your good comments.

Fun Blackboard fact: professors ask students to submit homework files with their initials prepended to them because Blackboard will overwrite files with the same name no matter who uploads them!

A professor actually asks students to submit homework files via blackboard? This is the first I've heard of such a thing, and I'm a prof (well, postdoc).

Blackboard is infamous for this. They hold patents for ridiculously vague definitions of web-based education...

And sue people like crazy to protect them...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.#Blackboard_lega...

It takes more space on their wikipedia entry than their actual products.

That isn't surprising, since their products are pretty terrible. My undergrad school used Blackboard and whenever the prof for a class actually wanted to use it (not often) it was a huge pain in the ass. Maybe they should fire some lawyers and hire some developers...

I can attest to that. I had to use Blackboard too when I was attending college, and it was a major pain, so much so that a sizable number of my professors preferred to just use mailing lists instead.

As part of my college job I had to administer a small Blackboard installation. For one, it did not allow upgrading the Windows server it ran on before the Blackboard code had been adapted for each new Microsoft patch. It was a pain.

According to that entry:

"On March 25, 2008, the US patent office issued a non-final action rejecting all 44 claims of Blackboard's patent."

So what is all the fuss about?

The fuss is that deep-pockets guys like Blackboard can stifle competition by suing the little guys, whose small profits get wiped out by lawyer fees before a court finally throws out the claims.

In other words: the big guys don't have to win (their law suits) to win (wipe out or scare off the competition).

Those bullet points aren't all suits. There's one involving domain names which they won (clearly they were in the right there). There's the one this article talks about (which has been going on for a while and was ruled in their favor previously) and another which it doesn't show the result of but wasn't over patents.

I wouldn't say 1 patent suit makes them overly-litigous.

You should read the patent. It is absurd. One lawsuit this silly makes them overly-litigious in my book. Seriously, I don't know how their attorneys keep a straight face.

A lawsuit over an issued patent is never absurd. It's a necessary mechanism by which our society fosters innovation. You won't have nearly as much innovation without patents, and you won't have patents without enforcement.

The patent itself may be silly, and the beautiful part of the system is that it can be overturned. That happens very frequently.

This is just a case of eggs being broken to make an omelet.

There is merit to what you both have said (Matt and Prophet) and I encourage you both to look at the situation from the other's point of view.

I know it isn't going to be popular to say that Blackboard is not a bad company for getting these patents and suing others for infringement. The truth is, the patent system is what mandates Blackboard's behavior. If Blackboard didn't get the overbearing patent when they could, another company would, and Blackboard would be the ones being sued for infringement right now. So blame the patent system and lobby to change it instead of getting mad at Blackboard.

By the way, my school is switching from Blackboard to ANGEL (open source) to save money.

Not a bad company for owning the patents? Agreed. Not a bad company for litigating on them? No. No one, not even a bad system, forced them to litigate. Just because a what a company does is legal doesn't mean it shouldn't cost them in public image.

I do agree with your main point, which is that the patent system needs to be changed. But startups like Desire2Learn are too busy to spend time fighting the US Patent system, especially when (like D2L) they aren't even based in the US.

They are a publicly traded company and litigating the issue makes business sense for them. For Blackboard to not sue their competitors for infringing on patents they own would not be against stockholder interest.

That is true. But it doesn't mean we should grant publicly traded companies immunity. The threat of bad press can be enough to make "doing the right thing" the better business decision.

If public perception is aligned with what is ethically right, it is better business for companies to be ethical. Although ethics is subjective, to me what Blackboard, Inc. is doing is unethical. Since it seems the majority here (and around the web, including current and potential customers) feel the same way, maybe litigating doesn't make so much business sense after all.

I think that must factor into their decision. Unfortunately, public opinion probably won't have much of a sway on their decision. Or rather, the public won't have an opinion. I could be wrong, but I imagine most of the money they make comes from a relatively small amount of customers buying for big school districts and universities, who certainly have other metrics than whether or not the company enforces patents it owns. In this case it seems they are doing what is best for shareholders, which is to hold and enforce the patents they own (regardless of if they really should have these patents or not, they were awarded them). It comes down to if the long-term decision to oust competitors pays off more than the short-term decision to lose some amount of paying customers.

A sad fact is that the average Joe doesn't really care enough to be aware of these patent issues.

*I added one to many 'not' in my last comment.

That's a good point. Blackboard is probably not going to change their decision from public opinion. I think where we differ is that I still think that public outrage is justified, if only to set an example for other companies (to whom public opinion is more valuable).

By the way, I hate to see you being downmodded just for having a contrary opinion, so I've upvoted your comments where I hadn't already. Hopefully some others who value discussion over groupthink will do the same.

If I were Blackboard, I'd write an open letter detailing how I was going to win $50 million off of them in court and then donate $1m to charity.

I am not on BB's side here, but this is a smart strategy. :)

Anyone have a link to the patent Blackboard claims they're infringing?

Having had to use Blackboard several times in the past, I have a hard time believing they have any IP that should be protected. As I recall, their functionality is similar to any number of portal-type applications (groups, discussions, document postings, different access levels, etc.) It looks to me as if their patents rest on the fact that they are applying obvious processes/technology to a specific vertical: education.

Of course I'm not an IP lawyer, this is just my layman's opinion.

Not only that, last time I used it, Blackboard was a sad, sad excuse for a web app. Poorly designed, poorly executed, bad usability overall. But Blackboard is the type of app IT managers love. It's what everyone else is using, so it must be Ok. No IT manager ever lost her job for buying something too conservative.

What really makes me disillusioned about the current state of IP law is that you mostly see the poorly performing incumbents go after the innovating start-ups with patent lawsuits. I know I'm biased about this, but I really can't remember the last time some fledgling start-up was trying to protect itself with its patents. With patent portfolios, size matters, as long as you've got plenty of tricks up your sleeve, you can always settle in a reasonable manner.

You're right. It's because the laws are designed to protect the big guys.

Pretend you are a patent lawyer. 98% of your business comes from big firms. Are you going to donate money and lobby to create laws that protect 98% of your revenue or are you going to push for laws that help small innovators?

When they first started pitching, we were a local school (Alexandria Va) and somewhat on the forefront of using tech in the classroom (for back then). I was co-chair of what you might call a "User group" (it was called the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Roundtable) back then, so I got to see their stuff and we came on board as an early adopter.

That said, I almost never used it. Yahoo provided all the functionality I needed that I didn't have on my web site or couldn't do with email (like chat for office hours, etc.).

It was just too cumbersome. I thought maybe they were better by now.

When I moved to the MA area, WebCT was in the area and I had an idea for them. Alas, they were bought by BB before I ever got anything organized. I figured at that time that BB was circling the drain. When the lawsuits started, I knew I was right.

#6,988,138 Internet-based education support system and methods

http://www.google.com/patents?id=RX94AAAAEBAJ&dq=6,988,1...

In plain english: http://mfeldstein.com/images/uploads/Blackboard_Patent_Claim...

* I'm a BB competitor, so it's in my area (that is, I hope I don't get sued)

Wow, that is a completely bogus patent. It is just a description of their software, translated into a patent. There's not one aspect of it that's non-obvious.

Students should organize a boycott of them. That would put pressure on them to stop this nonsense.

Students should organize a boycott of them. That would put pressure on them to stop this nonsense.

I agree, but I think students probably care as much about this as consumers did about Amazon's 1 click patent..

Also, in some cases they need the BB software for academic work.

As a student, I disagree. The professors think this is the best way to upload documents to the web. They spend a good 5 minutes every time they try to upload a document, thinking their labor is going into providing a consistent user interface for the students, but they generally dislike it also. Of course, they aren't. It's so hard to find content in BlackBoard that it causes students anxiety. Which they take to their professors, who are themselves frustrated with BlackBoard. Those conversations never go well.

What we are finding is that a lot of medical school students are setting up their own community sites off campus in part to provide an alternate way to access the material.

In general, the professors also dislike it. They have already moved to different software for grading. They only keep BlackBoard because they think the students want it. There are an essentially infinite number of ways to get documents to students electronically.

Many of these comments are legit, but as someone who works with faculty in a system that uses Blackboard, I must say that many instructors who use the software are indifferent, disorganized, and inconsistent. I find it hard to believe that a different software would magically solve these problems.

Blackboard can be frustrating and there's a learning curve, but this is true of virtually any software. (Ever used Photoshop, for example?) If content is "so hard to find in Blackboard that it causes students anxiety" the faculty member should seek some help. In that case, the problem isn't Blackboard--it's the user.

Why does something this "simple" (compared to photoshop, at least) have a learning curve?

The problem, especially when it comes to web-based apps, is never the user when it's a question of findability or usability. The onus is on the software interface designer and information architect to make things usable and findable. Especially for something so easily organized as "Courses, users who can access the course, assignments and turned in assignments, tests/quizes and grades, communication between students and students, and students and teacher."

Blackboard is an incredibly inefficient and confusing user interface for what it is.

The concept of blaming the user for usability problems is disheartening...

In this case it's blaming the professor for problems encountered by students, and I agree wholeheartedly with that. There are professors who were dragged kicking and screaming into the e-mail age five years ago and immediately forced to basically manage a web site. They go through what is to them a series of meaningless magic rituals, the chapter 10 section 3 homework assignment gets uploaded to the chapter6/Mondays/quizzes/attic/old/personal_photos/onion_on_my_belt/tarnation directory, one foreign student with an exaggerated impression of the consequences for missing a homework assignment actually clicks through every folder on the site until she finds it, and the professor gives a 0 on that assignment to every other student in the class because they didn't turn it in. And that, my friends, is a true story (merely the worst of many) though directory names have been changed because I can't really remember.

That said, Blackboard was really awful when I used it, which was six or seven years ago. It was archaic and felt like a careless amateur effort. Even on the best-organized Blackboard class site, everything was a few clicks further away than it should have been. It doesn't sound like they've had much incentive to improve it since then.

As someone who has had to work with BlackBoard as staff and then as student, and then as student rep on the curriculum committee, and then designing a new way to manage content at my school, I strongly disagree that there should be any learning curve. Our system is set up so you see the edit button as soon as you roll over the event, and then you login, and the login takes you to the event edit. Full disclosure, we're solving the problem for a med school, not a full on university, but there are a lot of med/law/business/etc schools at universities that would be much better served by a more focused system.

The user isn't the problem. The mind boggles that you even said that.

Google Apps for Education is much cheaper, and they know something about search. I showed just regular Google Apps to a few people in academia, and even the free version would be better than what they are doing. There is the annoyingly low file size limit though, that made uploading large data sets quite painful.

Students should organize a boycott of them. That would put pressure on them to stop this nonsense.

As a software developer, I completely agree.

As a student I care more about my grades and, dubious patents or not, my school and professors mandate that in order to pass I have to use Blackboard.

Most professors/departments (at least, in my experience) are very open minded, but often unaware about these things. Just let them know (nicely).

The schools make the buying decision, and the software is (in my understanding) usually compulsory for the course, so a boycott would put their academic success at risk. The best students can do is put pressure on their schools to switch.

A Wikipedia citation [1] states that all 44 patent claims were non-finally rejected on March 25th, 2008 upon re-examination. Does anyone know what ever came of this?

[1] http://mfeldstein.com/all-44-blackboard-patent-claims-invali...

This sounds like well orchestrated PR to me.

For better or worse, intellectual property laws exist, and Desire2learn.com seems to have infringed on Blackboard.

If Blackboard wins, Desire2learn suffers a big hit in their profits.

So Desire2learn says "Hey, here's an idea ... we won't change anything at all about what we're doing, but instead of paying you a big pile of cash, we propose to pay someone else a SMALLER pile of cash".

They're both profit-motivated companies (and I've got ZERO problem with that), and I dislike Desire2learn trying to pretend that they "care about the children", when it's clear that they're motivated primarily by the dollars and cents of the situation.

It's dishonest.

Of course PR is a part of this. They don't hide that. ("As for public opinion, yes, we plead guilty. We do value public opinion, especially in the educational community.") [1]

Have you read the patent claims? markbao posted them above in this thread. It's hard to side with Blackboard after reading what they are trying to protect.

[1] http://www.desire2learn.com/patentinfo/

While I agree that the patent is ridiculous in what it claims is an original idea, let's try to fix the patent system which awarded the patent, instead of blaming Blackboard for bad behavior.

After all, if Blackboard didn't get the patent first, some other company would, and Blackboard would be the one infringing.

All of these problems would go away if patents were awarded properly.

"instead of blaming Blackboard for bad behavior"

If Blackboard is behaving badly, then yes, we should blame them for bad behavior. Abusing the patent system, and lawyering your competitors to death in a frivolous patent suit is nasty, low, bad for the customer, and should result in karmic consequences (but karma, unfortunately, is not as effective or quick as it is on TV). At the very least, the "bad for the customer" bit ought to be a sin in any business mans book. If it isn't, the business deserves to die...and probably will, eventually. SCOX isn't doing so well these days, for example (not that they were exactly swimming in success before becoming evil, but it certainly hastened their demise).

And meanwhile, before the patent system gets fixed (assuming it ever will), we shouldn't blame Blackboard if it bullies the competition out of existence?

After all, if Blackboard didn't get the patent first, some other company would, and Blackboard would be the one infringing.

That argument is along the same lines as not convicting a hitman for accepting a hit on someone by rationalizing that if he didn't kill the victim, the business would just go to some other hitman. I think convicting whichever hitman accepted the assignment is reasonable, don't you?

This analogy would work if killing someone for profit was legal.

The discussion is not about legality. I was responding to the OP saying that we shouldn't "blame Blackboard for bad behaviour" because if they hadn't done it, then someone else would have done it anyway. Hence the analogy is valid.

I agree that a better patent system is the solution, but as a Canadian company, Desire2Learn isn't in much of a position to fix the US patent system.

> After all, if Blackboard didn't get the patent first, some other company would, and Blackboard would be the one infringing.

Owning the patent is one forgiveable - If I were them I would want the patent too for self-defence. What is indefensible is aggressive litigating over that patent to scare competitors.

I worked for a company that had close ties to BB and WebCT. Working with BB was always a nightmare - they were exactly what you would think from reading this page. WebCT were great to work with.

It was a sad day when the acquisition happened. Certainly one of the worst things that could happen for the students using the software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com