I'm in a room with at the old WebCT headquarters near Boston for the Common Cartridge work. The combination of this effort, the Interactive Learning Environments and the SOA working groups holds some real promise. More on this later with some thoughts on real world applications...

Now for the guts of the meeting.

The IMS team requested an audience with BB management to allow for it's members to pose questions on the recent lawsuit against D2L.
IMS requested that the meting not be recorded and as such I have not included any direct quotes from the interaction.

I wanted to comment on some interesting highlights from that exchange.

BB was represented by the Matt Small, Chris Vento and Jan Day although Matt fielded most of the questions as might be expected as the legal counsel.

One of the first questions directly from IMS was for Matt Small to define the scope of the patent. Matt Small described the complexity of the legal process and stated that he could not provide specifics but gave examples as he has done in previous interviews.
Matt then described the use of simple websites used by faculty to deliver courses on a one-off basis until Blackboard arrived on the scene with an 'enterprise' CMS that introduced the concept of roles for course delivery. This statement raised a few eyebrows around the room.

The example he gave was to describe the use case of a system where a user might have multiple roles across multiple courses.
This was particularly unfortunate since his example is vague and he challenges that the FUD in the community is due to a misreading of the patent and the claim.

One of the questions posed to Matt Small from IMS was the issue of the IMS IPR policy. IMS has it's own IPR policy where members are requested to raise awareness of any existing patents that they know may be in conflict with the work of the group at the beginning of each conference call and meeting.
It was asked of Chris Vento, why he (or any other BB members) had not raised these patents before in those calls.
Chris restated Matts point that this is a difficult and complicated issue. Both Matt Small and Chris Vento reiterated the view that it would take detailed analysis of each spec and it's work to assess if they were infringing on the patent(s).

An excellent point raised from a member was the fact that the IMS Enterprise Spec includes the facility to import and export users and roles across a course structure. If someone was to build such a tool (I know quite a few) then they would be at risk on infringement.

Matt Small was very clear that there was no plan to take action against the standards/specifications groups or the open source CMS projects, namely Moodle and Sakai. The problem is that these efforts are supported by commercial companies that support and promote their success in partnership and those companies should be worried as they represent revenue threats for BB. If small and medium players are removed from the competition, then there is no IMS or uptake of open source projects since there will be no support services available to drive adoption.

An interesting point Matt made was that BB and D2L will argue the issue in a court of law and the exact definition will be determined as a result.

Matt reiterated that BB does not want to stifle innovation in the industry. By placing us in a position where we won't know the exact scope of the patent until after a lengthy legal debate, they have done exactly that. While we wait for a court in Texas to decide what use case definition, analysis model or physical domain model we must avoid using in building systems for supporting education, we might as well sell sandwiches.