A company called TechRadium is suing Blackboard in East Texas (Marshall, not Lufkin) for allegedly infringing on their patent on mass notification systems. (Blackboard bought emergency notifications company NTI recently.) im+m has a copy of the complaint posted. We’ll try to get some analysis posted when we can. In the meantime, if you have a chance to read the complaint and notice anything noteworthy in it, please comment on it here so that we can consolidate these observations and follow up.
Michael Feldstein is the founder of e-Literate who currently works as the Senior Program Manager for MindTap at Cengage Learning. For more information, see his profile page.
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I skimmed the complaint (but not the patents themselves)….and I couldn’t seem to find much about the specific workings of the Blackboard/NTI tool that is claimed to be infringing. Otherwise, here’s my attempt at a summary:
TechRadium has a product (Immediate Response Information System, or IRIS) that allows one person to send a single message that is automatically delivered to group members in multiple ways (cell phone, landline phone, pager, email). Group members can specify their preferred method of receiving a message.
There are three patents that TechRadium says Blackboard (through the NTI product) is infringing: one patent that lets the one person send the message, one that applies the message to a school administrator contacting employees and parents, and one that covers the school administrator situation including the creation and delivery of the message and responses from recipients.