I have been watching this trial and your reporting of the case with interest for some time. I appreciate your regular updates.

I took the time to skim the instructions to the jury and for the life of me, I cannot figure out how this case even made to trial or what the claims of infringement are. I have been working in online education since 1996. I remember vividly the day that Dan Kane and Steven Gilfus drove their beat up car to Columbus, Ohio from Cornell and demonstrated their CourseInfo system. At the time it was a useful piece of software, but it did not differ in any way from other early renditions of course management systems such as WebCT and RealEducation(eCollege) that used a role based authentication system to present information to the user. CourseInfo would eventually be purchased by Blackboard as a course management system and developed from there, but I am at a loss as to how they can claim any unique invention since the idea of a role based system, which seems to be the basis for claims 36, 37 and 38, was common knowledge and readily recognizable to any person working in the field.

Every administrative component from WebCT to RealEducation (eCollege) permitted a system administrator to designate specific roles for uses so that they were able to view information particular to their role. Am I missing something here? The analogy that comes to mind would be a search engine claiming a patent on presenting results in order of relevance…or an online storage system claiming a patent on the use of the upload button to get content from a desktop to the network storage system. The fact is that these are common sets of features that evolved at the same time. I don’t see how someone can patent common methods and technologies.

Can anyone explain this to me in more detail?

John Zurovchak PhD