EFF is concerned about Blackboard's use of legal threats and a temporary restraining order to block a reverse engineering discussion at the Interz0ne II conference this past weekend. We have been contacted in the matter.

"Stopping speakers as they are preparing to give a scientific talk is a terrible prior restraint on speech," said Wendy Seltzer, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We look forward to investigating whether this litany of claims -- from trademark through economic espionage and the DMCA -- is just an attempt to intimidate Blackboard's critics."