I conferred with Jim Farmer on new patent infringement suit and a few interesting points came out:
- Tech Radium is suing Blackboard for violating three patents, some but not all of which are education-specific. This may or may not matter to you, depending on how you feel about software patents in general versus edupatents in particular.
- Tech Radium has held at least one of these patents for 2 years but is only filing suit now. It’s likely that NTI wasn’t big enough to go after from a financial perspective but that Blackboard is.
- As is usually the case in these sorts of situations, Blackboard has a strong economic motive to settle quickly. They now have first-hand knowledge of how long and expensive a patent fight can be. They will want to eliminate any uncertainty in their market around their product, which has apparently been selling well, as quickly as possible. And they are big enough that they can probably afford to pay royalties.
- Tech Radium also has strong incentive to settle quickly. Getting a settlement from Blackboard would strengthen their infringement case against any other challenger, effectively blocking other likely entrants–including open source entrants–into this market.
Keep in mind that these are patents about unified messaging to mobile phones and the like. This is a critical growth area for educational technology. It is in the interest of higher education to see Blackboard fight this patent, just as it has been in the interest of higher education to see D2L fight the ’138 patent.
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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