■   In 1996-1997, a Cornell University student partnered with a teaching assistant to create a system called CourseInfo. That system eventually became the basis for Blackboard.

■   At around the same time, a University of British Columbia computer science professor formed a company based on software he had been developing as part of his research at the university. That company was called WebCT.

■   About a year later, a graduate student and staff member at Curtin University in Australia who had been dissatisfied with WebCT began experimenting, creating what was to become Moodle.

■   About a year after that, a recent software systems design graduate from the University of Waterloo formed a company to sell e-learning systems that were based on his studies. That company was called Desire2Learn.

And on it goes. From 1960 to this day, teachers and students have driven innovation in virtual learning environments. Successful innovations have gotten commercialized or released as Open Source software. Once widely released, the developers of these platforms continue to turn to the teachers and students who use them for guidance on how to make them better. And as students and teachers grow dissatisfied with the current generation of products, they experiment and innovate again, developing the next generation. It has been a classic virtuous cycle.

That cycle is now in jeopardy.

Recently, the U.S. Patent Office issued Blackboard a patent for its course management software. Legal scholars and college officials fear it is overly broad, covering software that predates Blackboard or that institutions have created and customized for their own use. 

On the same July day the company announced it had acquired the patent, it filed an infringement lawsuit against competitor Desire2Learn. This is a precedent that threatens to shatter the virtuous cycle. Now, students and teachers who are dissatisfied with the current market offerings and wish to experiment and innovate, as they have always done, must consult with university legal counsel to find out if their work could put universities at risk of legal liability. Blackboard managers claim that they have no intention of suing schools; however, that statement is not a guarantee that they (or future managers) won’t change their minds. And even if universities decide that Blackboard’s one patent is not sufficient to stop the good work that teachers and students do to improve virtual classrooms, a successful infringement suit against Desire2Learn would encourage the many other holders of educational technology patents (including eCollege, SAP, Accenture and others) to consider patent litigation as a viable business strategy. While on-campus innovation may be able to survive the assertion of one patent, it probably cannot survive the assertion of a dozen.

Blackboard’s actions are both wrong and harmful. Wrong because they establish a precedent of companies claiming ownership over ideas that educators developed and freely gave in the spirit of improving education. Harmful because they put educators who wish to continue contributing to the betterment of education at risk of legal liability. The union should not stand for this. We should demand that our institutions boycott Blackboard and any other company that claims to own ideas created by teachers and students and freely given to the educational community.

Michael Feldstein is a member of the United University Professions and an Assistant Director at the SUNY Learning Network. He runs e-Literate, a technology blog at http://mfeldstein.com.