Blackboard, Inc. was awarded $3.1 million in a case against the Canadian company Desire2Learn, Inc. The case was heard in Lufkin, Texas, with the jury ruling that Desire2Learn had violated its patent for delivering course materials online and had not shown enough strong evidence that Blackboard's patent was invalid.
Blackboard is the course-management system Fordham uses to enable its students and teachers to access information on multiple courses and to keep students updated with grades and assignments.
Blackboard began the court case two weeks earlier seeking $17 million in lost profits and an injunction against Desire2Learn, a Canadian company that has 180 employees to Blackboard's nearly 1,000.
The case began with the witness Daniel E. Cane, considered the inventor of the patented process Blackboard uses. He testified that he started a small company at Cornell University in 1997 with his roommates to help teachers simplify the process of assigning and collecting papers with class web sites. In 1998, Cane and his friends moved to Washington, D.C., where a new company called Blackboard, run by Michael L. Chasen, was located. Chasen and Cane's companies merged, and the new Blackboard was formed.
Cane and his team were able to simplify the approach to course-management systems so that a single user could access multiple courses in multiple roles with one login.
According to Cane, this innovation replaced the use of separate Web addresses and separate names and passwords.
"This pretty much changed the entire industry," Cane said. "It was a huge success."
Desire2Learn, who was challenging Blackboard's patent, joined the Software Freedom Law Center, which fights for open-source software. Last year, the federal patent office had agreed to take a second look at Blackboard's patent and said the challenges raised "a substantial new question of patentability." The court ruled that only three of the 44 claims in the patent could be used in the trial to decide whether Desire2Learn was guilty of patent infringement. At the trial, James D. Dasso, the lead counsel for Desire2Learn, argued that Blackboard's patent was invalid because similar methods to that of Blackboard's were in place before the patent application was filed. Blackboard knew of this "prior art" and should have told the patent office. This evidence can invalidate a patent, and Desire2Learn introduced 13 examples of pre-existing "prior art" during the trial.
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