Dear Blackboard Community,

As you may know, several weeks ago, Blackboard received a favorable ruling in its patent case against Desire2Learn, one of our commercial competitors in the course management system arena.  In conjunction with the ruling, the Court presiding over the case set a hearing for March 10th to address several remaining questions surrounding the verdict.  Following that hearing, the judge today issued an order granting an injunction, which will not take effect for sixty days, on Desire2Learn products and services being sold and used in the United States that infringe Blackboard's U.S. Patent Number 6,988,138.  Over the coming sixty days, we are committed to collaborating with Desire2Learn to seek a resolution that enables their existing clients continued access to Desire2Learn teaching and learning solutions.

Now that the trial is over, we wanted to take this opportunity to update you and share a few thoughts about where we are.

We are of course gratified that the jury in February recognized the validity and importance of our contribution to e-Learning.  For over ten years, we have been fortunate to be a part of a period of unprecedented technology innovation in the educational industry.  In concert with our clients and partners, we’ve helped reshape how teaching and learning happen around the world today.  During the trial, many prominent members of the e-Learning community were present and spoke about this.  We’re grateful for their participation and their continued interest.

We also know that the case has generated a lot of discussion and concern in the education community, including significant speculation about our intentions.  We'd like to take this opportunity to reiterate a few key points.  From the beginning of this process, our intent has been to protect our intellectual property from a commercial competitor we believe, and the Court has now confirmed, is infringing our patent.  To make clear our focus in this process, we also announced the Blackboard Patent Pledge in February 2007.   Our Pledge was developed in collaboration with the boards of Educause and Sakai and with our clients. It is a legally-binding, worldwide pledge not to assert the patent against the use, development, or support of open source or home-grown course management systems to the extent that such systems are not bundled with proprietary software.  We continue to stand behind our pledge today.

Fast forward to the recent ruling and today’s order.  Our intent remains the same –
to be protected from ongoing infringement by Desire2Learn, but to continue to support educational institutions as they carry out their mission of teaching and learning.

As we move forward, we will continue to expand our ongoing commitment to the openness, industry standards, and community development that are at the heart of e-Learning innovation, be it open source, home-grown, commercially authored or all three.   We look forward to sharing more detail with you on our recent and ongoing efforts in all the above areas soon.  With our next generation and most open platform yet in the wings, the continued growth of the open-source, free or inexpensive extensions crafted by our developer community, and our deepening involvement in the standards community, there is much to talk about.

We also know that you may receive questions from colleagues so we will keep you posted as events warrant on any additional elements of this patent process in the coming weeks and months.

Thank you again for your interest, for the honest feedback you’ve provided throughout this process, and for your partnership in moving forward.  We know we serve an actively engaged and passionate community of educators and learners and truly value the opportunity to do so.