Blogs: A crossover reference: Peer-to-Patent

Friday, January 23, 2009 - 12:00 AM

Peer-to-Patent is a pilot project in collaboration with the US Patent and Trademark Office. It was established in 2007 and recently extended/expanded to June 15, 2009. It is focused on helping the patent office perform high-quality examinations of pending patent applications by enlisting the public to help find and explain prior art.... Peer-to-Patent uses social software features to facilitate discussion amongst groups of volunteer experts. Users can upload prior art references, participate in discussion forums, rate other user submissions, add research references, invite others, and more. This helps the examiners focus their attention on the submission(s) of prior art that have the highest relevance to an application.

Beth Simone Noveck, Law Professor, and Director, Institute for Information Law and Policy, New York Law School launched the Peer to Patent: Community Patent Review project.

Incentives for submitting an application to the project include:
• Expedited review. Public review begins one month after publication of the application. Review continues for four months, after which the patent examiner conducts an expedited examination of the patent application.
• Potentially stronger patents. If Peer-to-Patent review works as expected, patents that survive the process have already undergone considerable scrutiny and will be less at risk of a successful challenge later.
• Public service. Applicants can feel they are contributing to a valuable experiment in new models and technologies for public decision-making.

"The Peer-to-Patent Web site is built using open source technologies (RoR, MySQL, Linux OS). Hosted database/web servers, load balancers, and interactive features (threaded discussions, e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, social bookmarks, video clips, tagging, ratings, and more)."

Sponsors: CA, Inc., General Electric, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intellectual Ventures, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Microsoft, Omidyar Network, and Red Hat. Peertopatent.org content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 US License, except where otherwise noted.