Patent Law

Simon Owens alerted me to a piece he wrote for PBS on Article One Partners on March 17, 2009.  The following is an excerpt:

Ricky James Robertson knew very little about touch-screen personal navigation devices when he first began reviewing patents on them back in November of last year. He was surfing Slashdot when he came across a launch announcement for a company called Article One Partners; the group offered awards for as much as $50,000 to individuals who could invalidate specific patents that were currently under litigation. The 53-year-old Robertson is a 30-year veteran of the aerospace industry with a master's degree in aerospace engineering from MIT; he currently works for a small Huntsville, Ala., engineering consulting firm, but he soon found himself poring over navigation device patents.

...invalidating a patent is something like searching for a needle in a haystack -- it often requires someone who has a very specific field knowledge and is willing to search through hundreds of documents to find an invalidating piece of evidence.  Rather than relying on its own staff to find the needle, Article One Partners opens up the process to the wisdom of the crowd by offering large monetary awards to those that can discover prior art -- that is, public information relevant to a patent's claims of originality.

In February, the company announced that Robertson was one of two who had found relevant prior art for this particular patent. Because he had been first to submit, he received $35,000 while the other person received $15,000.

Though Article One Partners can make educated guesses as to whether a patent is invalid based on prior art, the company can't legally invalidate a patent on its own. This means that it will constantly be handing out large monetary awards with the possibility of the validity of these patents being held up in court. But Milone emphasized to me that the company isn't just about patent-busting, but also improving the efficiency of the patent system as a whole -- many consider the industry in dire need of reform.

Read the full article here and my prior posts on Article One Partners here, here, here and here.