This Friday, May 12, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will be holding a briefing on the Patent Peer Review Pilot Project, which aims to improve the dysfunctional patent examination process. Anyone who’s followed intellectual property issues knows the Patent Office is in a bad way. There are not enough qualified examiners, there are too many (even legitimate) patents to investigate thoroughly. The backlog of work is huge and growing daily. The USPTO briefing will discuss the concept of valid prior art and will provide an in-depth analysis of the peer review pilot project that is under consideration. I believe this is what they'll be discussing (from the Community Patent Project about page):
The Community Patent Project aims to design and pilot an online system for peer review of patents. The Community Patent system will support a network of experts to advise the Patent Office on prior art as well as to assist with patentability determinations. By using social software, such as social reputation, collaborative filtering and information visualization tools, we can apply the “wisdom of the crowd†– or, more accurately the wisdom of the experts – to complex social and scientific problems. This could make it easier to protect the inventor’s investment while safeguarding the marketplace of ideas.
I can’t wait to see how this pans out. It’s a fascinating idea – a bottom-up approach to regulation.
There’s plenty more (news, position papers, blogs, wikis, listserv) on the Peer to Patent Project website.
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