Patent Law

Fast Company pushes peer-to-patent

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Researchers at the Center for Technology Assessment hope to use that insight to clear out the enormous blacklog of U.S. patent applications, which is stifling American innovation simply because inventors must wait so long to get their patents approved and be assured of their intellectual property.

They argue that a social network for patents?which allows select volunteers to discuss patents and group analogous innovations?could greatly simplify the patent office's most onerous task: Identifying so-called "prior art"?all the other inventions that inform and compete with any supposed new idea. Already, the researchers have launched the "Peer-to-Patent" pilot project, outlined in the upcoming issue of the International Journal of Technolgy Transfer and Commercialisation.

One commenter wrote:

Great article on the overall trend at O'Reilly: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/peer-to-patent-and-article-one.html

See previous IPBiz post,

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2009/02/article-one-announces-prize-award.html

which includes the text:

I submitted 79 different examples of prior art on the GRMN study and had only a handful rejected as not relevant. The legal nuances of what constitutes prior art, and especially INVALIDATING prior art, are apparently subtle. The patent that was my personal favorite and that I thought would be totally invalidating apparently wasn?t, from a legal standpoint. Some of my patent submissions were deemed legally not relevant even when I couldn?t tell a difference from the patent I had submitted just before it. Ultimately I submitted tens of US Patents for consideration to AOP and none of them were the one that got me the GRMN prize. Only when I kept going and dug into WIPO patents did I come across the winner ? and I didn?t even know it when I found it. It was just one more item in a batch submission I made one week.

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 23, 2009 (boomark / email).