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Blackboard's work for IMS

Note: 4/1/2011. Several of the links below are broken. I am working on this.

Last week, in my (paid) half-time role as Executive Secretary of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT), I took part in ALT's teleconference with Matt Small, Blackboard's General Legal Counsel. The notes of the teleconference [110 kB PDF] are on the ALT web site.

Personally I do not think that software or business methods should be patentable, and I am glad that the position in the EU is different from that in the US and several other parts of the world.  (Interesting German article on the Blackboard patent.)  Whilst I can see why businesses feel compelled to take out patents in an environment in which if you do not do it someone else will, and harm you as a result, I am much less happy about the active use of patents against competitors, especially in contexts in which the ideas upon which a patent is based appear to be so widely drawn, with so much input from individual researchers and developers, from companies, and from institutions to whom the patented software is primarily sold.

One aspect of the Blackboard patent which I think is particularly interesting concerns Blackboard's involvement in 1997-1999 in the early stages of the IMS project.

Blackboard described its role at that time as IMS's primary technical contractor, as this snippet from a 2000 version of the Blackboard web site indicates:

"Recognizing the remarkable opportunity that a set of emerging industry standards represents, Blackboard is proud to have served as the primary technical contractor to IMS. Specifically, between February 1997 and December 1998, Blackboard acted as both a leader in IMS's standards design work and the primary development team for the creation of example software based on the standards."

Nowadays IMS is entirely focused on the creation of e-learning specifications. But in 1997-1998 it had a specific project to create an e-learning system proper, to demonstrate its specifications in practice. (Slides and text of a May 1998 presentation by Mark Resmer "EDUCOM's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative and the Instructional Management Systems Project". Resmer is now Senior VP for Technology at Whitney International University System.) And in 1998 it released the EDUCOM/NLII Instructional Management Systems Specifications Document Version 0.5 (April 29, 1998). (Note 1. This version has most of its diagrams missing; and interestingly (?) tThe document - which can be accessed as part of the im+m file to which there is a link below, contains quite a detailed treatment of roles, something which is central to the two so-called independent claims in the Blackboard patent. Note 2 - 15/9/2006. A compilation of a very wide range of documents relating to the e-learning state of the art, including the EDUCOM/NLII specification, and dated 22/12/1998, was published in 1999 as a CD by im+m. This is now available in PDF form [125 kB PDF] from the im+m web site.)

Did the specification of that prototype system, and the system itself, capture "prior art" which was then included by Blackboard in its patent?

Blackboard's Matthew Small, in the notes of the teleconference with ALT gives an unequivocal no:

"I do not know the specifics of what Blackboard did for IMS in the late 1990s, but the inventions embodied in the patent were derived entirely by Blackboard inventors. The patent and the IMS work had nothing to do with one another."

I think this statement needs to be read in combination with things which Blackboard itself said just over a year before making its provisional patent application, and which I came across on 30 August - though others had by this time already highlighted some of them. In particular, Blackboard issued 3 press releases on 29 April 1998 (the same date as the EDUCOM/NLII Instructional Management Systems Specifications Document Version 0.5). One of these concerned Blackboard's acquisition of investment capital. Here are extracts from the other two.

From Education on the Internet takes Major Step Toward Standards with Release of Educom's IMS Project Specifications:

"The IMS project is part of Educom's National Learning Infrastructure Initiative with staff drawn from California State University's Center for Distributed Learning, from the COLLEGIS Research Institute, and from other member organizations. Blackboard Inc. developed the example implementation under contract in collaboration with other project members. IMS works with the Defense Department's Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative providing technical specifications to support their guidelines for distributed training systems. Additional information on the IMS project can be found at www.imsproject.org."

From Blackboard Announces Development of IMS-based Course Delivery Tools:

"Blackboard Inc. today announced a major internal development effort to launch a full line of software products that will help university faculty deliver courses over the World Wide Web. The products are based on CourseInfo, a leading web-based course management system, and will utilize technologies developed by Blackboard on behalf of a major industry cooperative that includes universities, publishers, technology companies, federal agencies and others."

Of course it is entirely possible that by the time Blackboard came to submit its provisional patent application in 1999 its earlier intention to "utilize technologies developed .... on behalf of a major industry cooperative" had come to nothing, and/or that the patent deals with matters which are unconnected with those technologies. But I do think this issue deserves closer examination. Note 3 - 15 September 2006. Readers of this piece will be interested to read Desire2Learn's 14 September initial court response to Blackboard's patent infringement claim [124 kB PDF], and its more recent court filings.

Let's hope that was properly nailed in the meeting + teleconference between Blackboard and IMS that took place on 7 August. From Stuart Sim of Sun's posting from the meeting it is not clear that it was. Note 4 - 10 October 2006. The original contract between Blackboard LLC and Sonoma State University ("in support of the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) Instrucational Management System (IMS) project") has now come to light. Originally this ran from 9 June 1997 to 8 January 1998, but was subsequently extended to run until 8 January 1999. Blackboard's role was to "assist a core team of partner provided staff in developing the IMS reference implementation and associated products". Intellectual property and ownership of all products developed by Blackboard under the agreement was to be vested in Sonoma State University, with scope for "unrestricted in perpetuity use" of such products  by a range of commercial and not-for-profit organisations involved in the NLII IMS partnership, including Blackboard. Such use would include, but not be restricted to  "incorporation of source code into commercial products, redistribution of souce code to others, and transfer of these rights of use to others". At some point in 1998/1999 it looks as if the agreement was transferred  from Sonoma State University to EDUCAUSE.

Notes

  1. An article by ex IMS senior staffer Frank Tansey in the 16/8/2006 Campus Technology is relevant to this piece.
  2. This article was updated on 9/9/2006, 11/9/2006, and 15/9/2006, 10/10/2006, having first been published at the end of August.

Other posts about the Blackboard patent:

Posted on 09/09/2006 in News and comment |

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Comments

Though it is not my place to go into the details of the teleconference between Blackboard and IMS, it did not cover the details of Blackboard in those early days.

My guess is that Matthew Small, who also answered most of the questions during the IMS call, would have given the same answer as during the ALT call.

Pierre Gorissen - http://www.gorissen.info/Pierre/

Posted by: Pierre | 10/09/2006 at 08:28

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