A judge in Texas has ruled that 35 of the 44 patent claims Blackboard has filed against Desire2Learn are invalid.

In addition, the rules have been set down for the future court case. Specifically, the ruling spells out how key terms will be defined for the court case.

To illustrate how detailed these proceedings are, the terms that needed to be defined before the case could go to trial are “Hyperlink”, “Tool”, “Asynchronous communication” and “Synchronous communication”.

More details on this decision can be found on the D2L patent blog.