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Is patenthawk snarky on peer-to-patent?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

A student of Noveck's commenting on PatentHawk's criticism of peer to patent wrote:

Indeed, Phawk I like your blog for what you deliver but your commentary is overly snarky. They are entitled to their opinions of the system just as you are entitled to your opinion. What exactly is your opinion though by the way? Is the system doing just fine hunky dorey or is it just all the PTO's fault that toolbar patents are being asserted against MS, the one-click debacle happened and etc? Is it just the lack of "rigourous examination" that leads to bad patents (and apparently the backlog at the same time, even though the two require opposite things to exist)? What kind of examination do you think you get anyway?

Some past discussion on IPBiz of the failures of peer-to-patent:

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/12/confusion-among-community-patent-review.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/09/another-reason-why-peer-to-patent-is.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/06/gross-praises-peer-to-patent-but-lets.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/03/more-on-peer-to-patent.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/03/ap-on-peer-to-patent.html

Puffery on peer-to-patent? Drew Carey to head USPTO?

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/07/peer-to-patent-preliminary-boxscore.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/07/peer-to-patent-1078-reviewers-produced.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2008/04/april-08-press-release-from-peer-to.html

Among other things, recall the high fraction of reviewers on peer-to-patent who were IBM
employees. [On Sept. 18, 404 user profiles relating to IBM.]

Recall:

Note a post on IPBiz on July 1 [2008] which included:

Also note: As with Wikipedia, where the visitor count far exceeds the number of editors who actually write the encyclopedia entries, only 365 (18 percent) of the 2,000 peer reviewers who have registered on the Peer-to-Patent Web site are considered to be ?active? participants who did the work of submitting prior art in connection with the public review of the first 40 applications. (...) Of the 365, 104 came from IBM (...) The survey results indicated that all (100 percent) of the participants found the application understandable or easier than most patent applications. The applications were not difficult to read or understand.

[from Students testing limits of turnitin

Full post as published by IPBiz on September 18, 2008 (boomark / email).