Software company Desire2Learn Inc. has filed its own challenge with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine a patent owned by rival company Blackboard Inc.
The move comes weeks after the Software Freedom Law Center, an open-source advocacy group, filed its own challenge of the validity of Blackboard’s controversial patent. Blackboard received a patent on its e-learning software in January and subsequently sued Desire2Learn for patent infringement. Desire2Learn and higher-education officials have criticized the patent for being too broad and want the patent office to invalidate it. —Dan Carnevale
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