edremy writes “Blackboard, the dominant learning management system (LMS) maker, has won its initial suit against Desire2Learn. Blackboard gets $3.1 million and can demand that Desire2Learn stop US sales. (We discussed Blackboard when the patent was issued in 2006) This blog provides background on the suit. Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn’t think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it’s been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a big amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard’s pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding).”

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes “A federal judge in Connecticut has rejected the RIAA’s ‘making available’ theory, which is the basis of all of the RIAA’s peer to peer file sharing cases. In Atlantic v. Brennan, in a 9-page thought [PDF], Judge Janet Bond Arterton held that the RIAA needs to prove ‘actual distribution of copies’, and cannot rely — as it was permitted to do in Capitol v. Thomas — upon the mere fact that there are song files on the defendant’s personal and that they were ‘available’. This is the same issue that has been the subject of extensive briefing in two contested cases in New York, Elektra v. Barker and Warner v. Cassin. Judge Arterton also held that the defendant had other possible defenses, such as the unconstitutionality of the RIAA’s damages theory and possible copyright misuse flowing from the record companies’ anticompetitive behavior.”

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Xelios writes “DivX announced today that it will be shutting down Stage6, its high-quality video sharing site. ‘So why are we shutting the service down? Well, the short answer is that the continued operation of Stage6 is a very expensive enterprise that requires an enormous amount of attention and resources that we’re not in a position to continue to provide. There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day its really as simple as that.’ The news comes after the former CEO of DivX stepped down last year to head Stage6, which was to become a separate company, and the still ongoing legal battle with UMG.”

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Gallenod writes “The Denver Post is reporting that the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld the decision of a Federal judge who threw out and reversed a jury decision in favor of a patent infringement claim and ordered the plaintiff’s lawyers to pay the defendants’ court costs. U.S. District Senior Judge Richard P. Matsch sanctioned the plaintiff’s attorneys for ‘cavalier and abusive’ misconduct and for having a ‘what can I get away with?’ attitude during a 13-day patent infringement trial in Denver. With the Appeals Court in agreement, could this case be the ’shot heard round the world’ in the revolution against patent trolls?”

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LCB - Finance Department
Information on undergraduate, MBA and doctoral curriculums.

International Education Finance Corporation
Finance for sustainable development is the subject of Chapter 33 of Agenda 21 and … Decisions on finance for sustainable development were taken by the …

The New England College of Finance

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stinkymountain writes to tell us that NetworkWorld got their hands on Microsoft’s latest addition to the server OS market and had a opportunity to poke around inside Windows Server 2008. It seems that the new release is a vast improvement over older versions in both security and performance but still lacking in several key areas. “There’s even a minimalist installation called Windows Server Core that can run various server roles (such as DNS, DHCP, Active Directory components) but not applications (like SQL Server or IIS dynamic pages). It’s otherwise a scripted host system for headless operations. There’s no GUI front end to a Windows Server Core box, but it is managed by a command line interface (CLI), scripts, remotely via System Manager or other management applications that support Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), or by Remote Terminal Services. It’s also a potential resource-slimmed substrate for Hyper-V and virtualization architectures.”

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narramissic writes “In a current ITworld article, Security researcher Brent Huston ponders how it is that versions of SQL worms dating back to 2002 represent nearly 70% of all malicious traffic on the Internet today. ‘I have made a few attempts to backtrack hosts that perform the scans and at first blush many show the signs of common botnet infections. Most are not running exposed SQL themselves, so that means that the code has likely been implemented into many bot-net exploitation frameworks. Perhaps the bot masters have the idea that when they infiltrate a commercial network, the SQL exploits will be available and useful to them? My assessment team states this is pretty true. Even today, they find blank “sa” passwords and other age-old SQL issues inside major corporate clients. So perhaps, that is why these old exploits continue to thrive.”

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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Linux, Web services, Open Source, Social Software

Twitter doesn’t have a grouping feature yet (even though they stated 7 months ago it was “at the top of their list”) but that hasn’t stopped a group of open source aficionados from finding a way to form one anyway. Five Twitterers including SourceForge’s Ross Turk and open source analyst extraordinaire Raven Zachary launched The Pulse of Open Source today, calling it a “collective stream of consciousness from the open source community.” We just call it “cool.”

All you need to do is bookmark and visit the site, or add it to your feed reader. As people the site follows update their Twitter feeds during the day, their tweets appear on the site or in your reader. The site follows a wide assortment of open source community members ranging from CEOs of companies like MindTouch, to community managers of projects like OpenSUSE and Hyperic.

The tweets don’t always focus on open source, but we like that because otherwise the site wouldn’t be as much fun. How else would we know how Zachary got those cool glasses?

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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, Freeware, web 2.0

The New York Times company has launched a new application that makes it easy to save web links and notes and synchronize them between multiple devices. ShifD has several components.

There’s a web page where you can add notes in three categories: Links, places, and notes. You can also add a “ShifD This” browser bookmarklet that lets you instantly save any web page you’re visiting to the Links category.

You can also run ShifD as an application using the Desktop client built on Adobe AIR. And you can also access and update your ShifD information from a mobile phone. There’s a mobile version of the internet page optimized for the iPhone and other small screen devices. Or you can send notes to your ShifD account via text messages.

ShifD is currently in public beta. The SMS updating feature isn’t available yet, but should be rolled out within the next few weeks.

[via Mobility Site]

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services

DivX has announced plans to shut down its video hosting service Stage6 on February 28th. As of this morning, the company has disabled the uploading feature, but if there’s a few videos you’ve been meaning to watch, you’ve only got a few days to cross them off your list.

Stage6 never really got the kind of attention that its competitors like YouTube and DailyMotion have. But Stage6 has supported high definition video streaming longer than nearly anyone else. Their video player is slick and easy to use, and we have the ability to only hope that another company will license the technology.

Last year DivX considered selling Stage6 or spinning the service off as a private company, but neither option seemed economically feasible. The company has now decided that it can’t justify the cost of running the bandwidth-heavy service and instead will focus on working with hardware makers to deliver DivX-certified devices like media extenders, DVD players, and video game consoles.

[via Electronista]

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