Stephen Downes

Michael Feldstein briefly summarizes his conversations with Blackboard's Matthew Small and Desire2Learn's CEO John Baker. "I emphasized that, even if I thought that Blackboard's patent were valid, I would still oppose their efforts because of the damage that an environment of patent litigation will have on innovation." He also links to a nice article from Stephen Marshall summarizing the Blackboard Town Hall meeting at EDUCAUSE. "The idea that the creation of software should be a legally bounded and constrained activity is repugnant personally and its sad that increasingly lawyers seem to be controlling innovation in software rather than programmers." And I echo Feldstein: yup.