Right on the heals of Blackboard Inc. announcing that the company has been awarded patent number 6,988,138 for "Internet-based education support system and methods," Blackboard has sued one of its rivals, Desire2Learn Inc., accusing them of infringing on the aformentioned patent.  The allegation by Blackboard Inc. against Desire2Learn for patent infringement was made on the same day of the press release.

Desire2Learn published this comment on their patent-info blog:

We are disappointed that Blackboard turned to the court system before discussing its claims with us. We intend to defend the action vigorously, but because we just received notice two business days ago, we are unable to comment further at this time. Please understand that due to the nature of litigation some information can not be provided at this time. We pledge that as we are able to provide additional clarity on this matter, we will share information with all of our clients.

Additional documents corresponding to the lawsuit have been published by Desire2Learn on this blog as well.

Blackboard has yet to publish a press release on their corporate news site pertaining to the lawsuit, as of August 6, 2006

Many comments (see: e-Literate, AcademicCommons.org, and Slashdot.org) have been made that the broadness of the patent awarded to Blackboard could be disastrous to course management systems that are developed under open source licenses, though "senior vice president and general counsel for Blackboard, Matthew Small, said that it would make no sense for Blackboard to go after open-source programs like Moodle and Sakai because they are not commercial providers." (The Chronicle, August 2)

According to Blackboard's own announcement, patents have been issued in Australia, New Zealand and Singapore and are pending in the European Union, China, Japan, Canada, India, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, Hong Kong and Brazil.

The lawsuit filed by Blackboard comes after recent acquisitions of other rivals in the field of Online learning, Prometheus and WebCT.