April 2008 — News

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Blackboard Vows To Press On

by Dave Nagel

Small: It was at least twice.

Nagel: All right.

Small: I personally went to the Patent Office and sat down with the examiners at least twice.

Nagel: Okay.

Small: ... It's a very strong patent. I think one of the reasons people have criticized it is because they're applying what they believe is obvious today in 2008 to the patent, and the legal standard is what was obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the art at the conception of the invention.

Nagel: There's been some question about this. In terms of the items that you patented, did Blackboard develop these entirely in house?

Small: Yes.

Nagel: There were no external contributions to it?

Small: No.

Nagel: Okay....

Small: Now, when you say "developed," you mean the actual product?

Nagel: Just the items in the patent.

Small: Well, let me be clear. It was certainly an invention of some of the founders of the company. Some of the elements in that were around for a long time. So for example, if you have a patent on the ... intermittent windshield wiper [for] an automobile, you may describe the automobile; you may say intermittent windshield wiper with steering wheel, with car, with windshield wipers, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you invented the windshield wiper or the car or the steering wheel. It could be the intermittent function. But you describe that function with other things.

So did the course management system exist prior to our patent? Absolutely. It was a very robust market. In early 1998 there were a number of products in the market, including our own, including WebCT, including Prometheus, including Web Course in a Box and Top Class and SERF and a whole bunch of others.... There were also role-based access control[s] in the world that had been around since the mid-'80s, in other industries primarily, such as banking. But in late 1998, it was not obvious that you would take role-based access control and apply it in the way that we did to a course management system.

The LMS Market Past
Small: You really have to remember what the Web was like a decade ago. It was HTML. We didn't have browsers like we have now. And all of the course management systems that were out there treated each class as an island unto itself. If you were a student in one role and a teaching assistant in another course, you would be two logons, two accounts, two profiles, two calendars. You couldn't just move from course to course and retain your online identity and have your rights and privileges change as you did that.

At the time, there was fierce competition, and everyone was focused on features and functionality--the next best bell or whistle to sell more of these things. Blackboard stepped back and said, "You know what, let's stop the feature war, and let's go back to our code architecture and rebuild [the] enterprise course management system from the ground up."