Well it seems that a lawsuit has been brought by Blackboard on Desire2Learn for patent infringement. The details can be found at this BBC news article. The gist of the entire thing is that Blackboard was given a broad patent over online learning techniques which they now claim that Desire2Learn has infringed upon in their products. Desire2Learn
This is of interest to me since I plan to use a product called Moodle to assist with online learning. Moodle is a free open-source Learning Management System (LMS) or Course Management System (CMS). Moodle has teamed up with Sakai, another open-source LMS, to provide a defense on these ridiculous claims.
The open-source community has come up in force against the lawsuit and has launched a wiki website “No Education Patents!” to assist in the fight by documenting instances of prior art against the patents.
This lawsuit is a threat to educational innovation and to technological innovation on a whole and invite you all to keep informed of this and join the fight.