Bill Fitzgerald :: Blog :: Blackboard granted patent on series of tubes

Blackboard, Inc. announced that it has been awarded a patent on a series of tubes. The announcement struck a note of alarm that rang through a variety of audiences ranging from elearning professionals to the United Association of Plumbers and Pipe Fitters.

The broadly worded language of the patent has sparked concerns that the patent, if interpreted liberally in favor of Blackboard, could give the elearning giant nearly unlimited control over yesterday’s technology. The freshly granted patent was originally filed in 2000, and it has raised questions about how Blackboard will be compensated for the numerous violations by other online and computer-assisted instructional tools in use in the three decades before Blackboard’s patent application ever existed.

The opening claims of the patent describe the general outlines of the system:

1. A tube-based contrivance for providing to an educational community of users access to a plurality of different tubes for different courses, comprising thicker or thinner tubes dependent on the density of the subject matter.



2. The system of claim 1 wherein the course instructor is granted access rights to fill the tubes with both fluid information and solid nuggets of fact; this blend shall hereinafter be referred to as the “knowledge slurry;”



3. The system of claim 1 wherein the knowledge slurry is forced through the tubes by institutional pressure, or by an overwhelming amount of force applied from above;



4. The system of claim 2 wherein people can be granted a student role; each student is in turn granted access to their own personal tube and nozzle;



5. The system of claim 4 wherein each student guzzles the knowledge slurry.

Senator Ted Stevens, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Science, Commerce, and Transportation, did not respond to several emails requesting comment. A staffer, however, issued the following handwritten statement:

The Senator is glad to hear that this patent separates Blackboard’s tubes from his own personal internets. He has movies to watch, and doesn’t want any messages to get in the way of the movie delivery, as he has ordered ten of them and the delivery charge is free.

On July 26th, shortly after being awarded the patent, Blackboard sued Desire2Learn (pdf download), a leading competitor. A Desire2Learn executive who insisted on remaining anonymous gave us this analysis: “We’re not a series of tubes. We’re more like a dump truck.”