Prior art and obviousness

Prior art and obviousness

Regarding Blackboard, I think they also misunderstood their users. Many educational institutions are huge: they create and use a massive amount of software. Being so large they run a lot of competing software: Word and OpenOffice, Windows and MacOS and Linux, MySQL and Oracle, SAS and SPSS and R. And in this case, Blackboard and Moodle and home-grown systems.

Sure, universities might centrally prefer particular software for support reasons, Windows + Office for example. But only an insane university would prevent the use of alternatives; researchers get upset and leave when administrative roadblocks are placed in the way of getting the job done.

So when Blackboard threatened a patent suit against their competitors, the response of these large institutions was to feel threatened. And the simplest way to stop that threat -- financially hurt Blackboard by stopping use of their product. Unlike a lot of directives from central administration at universities, this one would have full support from the staff and faculties.

Blackboard's patent pledge was the minimal step Blackboard could take to prevent its largest users from jumping ship. Even so, the minimalistic nature of the pledge has got its best customers deeply concerned and happy to fund objections to the patent as the best strategy of making this problem go away.

There's also a 'SCO effect' happening. When SCO launched their lawsuit the instinct of university IT Directors was to say "get rid of this SCO thing out of my shop, asap". Ironic, since most large universities hold a AT&T-era UNIX source license. The Blackboard litigation is leading to a similar, but to date smaller, response.