Patent Law

As a follow-up to my previous post on Article One Partners, take a look at what Asher Hawkins writes for Forbes:

For each Internet social network effort that thrives, there are dozens that fail to generate any interest from the surfing masses.

An early dud was BountyQuest.com, launched in 2000 with financial backing from Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The premise was simple: Posters to the site would highlight a patent they wanted to see blown out of the water, and visitors could receive up to $50,000 for presenting evidence that the patent wasn't, in fact, the first document to describe the invention in question. BountyQuest's problem was that too few got involved in the action. It fizzled within three years.

One former employee, Cheryl Milone, believes the company's business model deserves a second chance, given the rise in popularity of "crowdsourced" online projects like Wikipedia. In November, Milone, a Manhattan patent attorney, launched ArticleOnePartners.com to do more than just provide a means for prior-art mercenaries to peddle their wares. This time, Milone and a team of three intellectual property lawyers are the ones deciding which patents visitors should be harassing. And she's got two strategies for quickly turning a buck if a visitor does submit patent-busting information.

Say a visitor sends ArticleOne evidence (an article in an obscure academic journal, for example) that calls into question the validity of one of Pfizer's Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ) patents for cholesterol reducer Lipitor. Milone would make that information public on the site--and, at the same time, she could short the stock of Pfizer and go long on the stock of competitors eager to sell a generic version of Lipitor. In theory, she'd make a bundle once the industry finds out what she knows.

Within three days of launching, ArticleOne received more than 50 prior-art submissions, some from as far away as India and the Ukraine.

Read the full article here.