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Blackboard Awarded Patent for LMS Technology

What is this? On 26 July 2006 Blackboard announced that they had been awarded the patent for eLearning technology (no. 6,988,138). Upon reading this patent it occurs to me that they have pretty much patented the concept of the LMS. What sort of implications will this have on the open LMS platforms out there today? Well…what if Nike were awarded the patent for the “cross-trainer” concept?

Now it seems Blackboard is suing Desire2Learn. There are details about this on the Moodle discussion board, and more details to come once boycottblackboard.org is officially launched. While considering these latest developments let’s recap the history of virtual learning environments.

It is about time someone got proactive and laid claim to the concept of the LMS. This news is almost as huge as Microsoft protecting the use of the numbers one and zero as their intellectual property.

 Tags:interest rant software technology

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 13th, 2006 at 8:17 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.