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Comment by tjic | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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