Michael Feldstein picked up on some good news on Desire2Learn's blog. The US Patent and Trademark Office has denied Blackboard’s request to suspend the re-examination process.

Bb and D2L have been fighting over the venue for the next round of the battle, with Blackboard asking the USPTO not to complete the re-examination process (despite having earlier said that a re-exam would only make their patent stronger) and D2L asking the US Court of Appeals not to hear Blackboard’s case until the USPTO issues a final ruling. D2L has won the first of these two battles.

I've been largely ignoring the Blackboard patent for the past several months expecting that the challenges by Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Center will just make it go away. I'm still optimistically confident that's the case but Michael Feldstein's post from the other day caught my eye. Bb and D2L have each prepared and posted tutorials that describe their positions.

There's a lot about this whole case that gets under my skin but maybe the worst thing about it is the amount of energy Bb is draining from our collective energy to advance the use of technology in education.

D2L Tutorial
Bb Tutorial
* wait 15-20s for load time. As the folks at D2L indicate, I had a lot of trouble getting the Bb tutorial to work. I found that if I hit the 'jog back 5 seconds' button each time it stalled, I could get through it.

Just getting this one over with. :-)

Nate, thanks for the blog recipe.