EDITOR'S COMMENT: Dust flies as Blackboard tries to chalk up patent victory

The decision by Blackboard, the US-based education-focused e-learning company, to assert its rights over ownership of software that powers a chunk of online education has ruffled feathers at the start of the academic year. The patent, which according to US reports was actually granted in January but only became known in the late summer, has predictably enough caused a huge flap in the academic and e-learning communities.

Blackboard's argument seems reasonable enough. It contends that it would not be a level playing field if someone could enter the e-learning market, copy everything that Blackboard (and its expensively acquired subsidiary WebCT) has done and call it their own. Fair enough, especially if you accept the company's figure that it has ploughed $100 million into developing the technology.

An asset - as defined by the accounting profession - is an existing economic resource with the ability to generate economic benefits to the entity. Blackboard says it owns an asset and wants to see some economic benefit. Blackboard is not claiming to have invented or to have received a patent on all e-learning or course management systems ever created. Nor is it laying claim to a broad range of elearning tools, such as discussion boards or chat rooms. But it is laying claim to a particular system.

As we note in the news some sectors of the e-learning community are worried (see news page 2). One US academic said the patent was "antithetical to the way that academia makes progress." Well maybe, but what the patent does show is a long-standing cultural divide between the not-for-profit sector and the commercial sector. Academics' main business is pursuing knowledge and teaching. The main objective of enterprise is the pursuit of profit. Both are entirely legitimate. But, as this case illustrates, not always compatible.

Peter Williams

Copyright Bizmedia Ltd. Sep 2006
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