Well, I suppose you’ve seen by now that Blackboard and Desire2Learn have settled their legal battles and cross-licensed their e-learning patent portfolios. Given that the respective press releases (Bb and D2L) were identical and extremely short, I don’t expect to hear much discussion from either company, although D2L did add some commentary on their patent blog and Ray Henderson of Bb had a good blog post as well. Perhaps Bb’s public filings will shed some further insight into whether any payments are changing hands but, at the end of the day, any one-time payments won’t matter much to the future and I highly doubt there are ongoing royalty payments as part of the settlement (I could be wrong…there is no way to tell right now).
Of course a combination of factors went into this decision on both sides. I’m personally very pleased that this is finished although slightly nauseous when I think about the amount of money that was spent on legal action.
Filed under: e-learning | Tagged: bb, d2l, e-learning, Sakai
I’m sorry I’m a little behind the curve (time wise) but I’ve added my 2 cents here:
http://rmostell.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/blackboard-and-desire2learn-settle-their-patent-disputes/
Unfortunately, I think there are still numerous unanswered questions about the ‘138 (Alcorn) patent and other LMS-related patents by Blackboard.