October 19, 2009, 03:00 PM ET
After Latest Loss in Patent Case, Blackboard Looks to the Supreme Court
Blackboard Inc. plans to ask the Supreme Court to review its patent battle with its rival Desire2Learn after a federal appeals court last week denied the company's request to have a larger panel of the court reconsider the case.
The company will soon file its request for consideration by the nation's highest court, said Matthew Small, Blackboard's general counsel, in an interview Monday, though he acknowledged that "it is very unlikely that any case is ever heard by the Supreme Court."
"I think we have a very good reason to ask for the decision to be reheard," he added. But he declined to give specifics, noting only that "it would be inappropriate for me to characterize a future legal pleading here."
He played down the latest ruling and the company's request for Supreme Court consideration, noting that Blackboard officials have long said they would...
Read MoreSeptember 29, 2009, 12:00 PM ET
Bucknell U. Investigates Letters Saying That Students Owe for Downloads
More than 300 students at Bucknell University got hit with letters from a collection agency last week charging that they had illegally downloaded material from Cayman Academic Resources and must pay $500 "to settle this matter."
Several of the students who got the letter contacted university officials and said that they had never heard of the company and that they did not do the downloading. Now Jason Friedberg, chief of public safety for the university, suspects that the letters were part of a scam. He contacted the collection agency, Advanced Collection Services, which told him it is now having trouble contacting the client and plans to rescind the letters.
When The Chronicle called Advanced Collection Services today, a woman who answered refused to answer questions about the incident and hung up abruptly. Messages to other employees of the company were...
Read MoreAugust 03, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit
A two-year battle over copyright infringement between four students and Turnitin, a commerical plagiarism-detection service, came to an apparent end last Friday in a settlement that prohibits either party from taking further legal action.
The high-school students first sued iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company, in 2007 for copyright infringement, saying the company took their papers against their will and then made a profit from them.The students' high schools required them to use the service, which scans papers for plagiarism and then adds them to its database, which students argued could easily be hacked.
But the students and their lawyers were handed two decisions against them -- first from the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., in March 2008 and again this April from the U.S. Court of Appeals...
Read MoreApril 28, 2009, 01:47 PM ET
The Internet Archive Cannot Join Google Suit, Judge Says
The federal judge in charge of the Google Book Search settlement has shot down the Internet Archive’s request to join the case, Publishers Weekly reported today. The archive had hoped to take advantage of the copyright-liability protections built into the settlement for its own book-digitizing work, and it still may file an amicus brief by the court’s May 5 deadline for objections and comments, according to the report. —Jennifer Howard
April 23, 2009, 03:49 PM ET
Blackboard Files Complaint With U.S. International Trade Commission Seeking to Block Sales of a Competitor's Products
Blackboard Inc. opened a new front in its battle against rival Desire2Learn this week, filing a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission seeking to block the import of the Canadian company’s products because of alleged patent infringement.
In Blackboard’s filing with the commission, which it submitted on Monday, the company called for an investigation and asked that the body ultimately “halt the importation, marketing, advertising, demonstration, servicing, sale, and use” of Desire2Learn’s course-management system in the United States. Blackboard claims in the filing that Desire2Learn is violating the company’s patent and selling the infringing product in America, in violation of the Tariff Act of 1930.
Within 30 days after such a request is filed, the commission will decide whether to proceed with an...
Read MoreApril 21, 2009, 09:11 AM ET
Internet Archive Wants In on Google Settlement
The Internet Archive wants to be part of Google’s settlement with the Authors Guild over the Google Book Search program. In a letter posted on the Web site of the Open Content Alliance, a joint library repository managed by the archive, the group’s lawyers asked the judge in the case for permission to file a motion to join the proceedings as a “party defendant.”
A nonprofit group dedicated to building a digital library of Web sites and “other cultural artifacts in digital form,” the archive is best known for the Wayback Machine, a repository of archived Web sites. Like Google, it has also been scanning books. With a million works in hand from more than 150 libraries, the letter states, “the Archive’s text archive is...
Read MoreApril 20, 2009, 03:30 PM ET
Students Lose, Fair Use Wins in Suit Targeting Anti-Plagiarism Tool
Students have suffered another defeat in their legal fight against the company that runs a plagiarism-detection tool popular among professors.
A federal appeals court last week affirmed a lower court’s decision that the Turnitin service does not violate the copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays in the database that the company uses to check works for academic dishonesty.
The opinion from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit “will be cheered by digital fair-use proponents,” says the E-Commerce and Tech Law blog.
Last year’s decision in the plagiarism...
Read MoreApril 20, 2009, 08:09 AM ET
In Preliminary Ruling, Patent Office Rejects Blackboard's Claims
Last week the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a preliminary ruling rejecting all 57 claims in a software patent that Blackboard Inc. used to successfully sue rival Desire2Learn for infringement. But the long-running patent battle between the two providers of course-management software is far from over, and the re-examination process could drag on for years because of the many chances that Blackboard has to appeal.
See the full report in today’s online edition of The Chronicle.
April 17, 2009, 08:49 AM ET
Judge Bars the Internet From the Courtroom in a File-Sharing Case
So much for the long-awaited, fiercely contested Webcast in the recording industry’s hottest piracy case. A federal appellate judge ruled today that it cannot happen.
Charles Nesson, a Harvard Law School professor, had asked to Webcast a court hearing in the case against his client Joel Tenenbaum, a graduate student at Boston University whom Sony BMG Music Entertainment sued for copyright infringement. The presiding federal judge, Nancy Gertner, approved the request in January. But the recording industry, fearing that the hearing in U.S. District Court in Boston would become a circus, appealed to...
Read MoreMarch 24, 2009, 07:22 AM ET
Introducing Guest Blogger Jonathan Zittrain
Our new guest blogger is Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School and co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
You may know him as the author of the recent book The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It. Or from the blog he started with students called Chilling Effects, which tracks legal threats made to online content producers. Or you may have benefited from his attempts to curb the growth of malicious Internet software (he helped start
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