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USPTO to Use Peer to Patent Program
An anonymous reader writes "DailyTech is reporting that the US Patent and Trademark Office is going to start using the Peer to Patent program. From the article:' The US Patent and Trademark Office has been getting praise for officially launching the Peer to Patent program -- the purpose of Peer to Patent is to find patents that have been issued for already made products or items that don't properly qualify for a patent. Because the USPTO usually does not have the manpower and time to thoroughly check every patent that comes into the office, many are unjustly rubber stamped.' The program will utilize a Wiki, among other tools, to get the job done."
'bout time.
This sig rocks the casbah.
The most interesting thing on the site is the research style paper entitled "Peer to Patent": Collective Intelligence and Intellectual Property Reform by Beth Simone Noveck. There's an insane amount of footnotes on the first opening pages and it is a PDF so I will repost the abstract:
As you can see, it's a pretty far-reaching and very hopeful aim at fixing something that the vast majority of our community, Slashdot, view as a broken system.
So there you have it. Something is broken, here's the proposed solution now let's see if it works. The only possible show stopper I see here is that I'm not so sure it would benefit anyone to join this proposed community of "patent clerks." They are hoping for an army of people to read over patents and notice similarities or infringements for proposed patents. The Wiki's answer to my concer
My work here is dung.
I do hope that someone has patented this wonderful new technology!
(sorry, couldn't resist).
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Sounds like we already have that here on Slashdot; let us review patent applications. I am sure we can fair and unbiased, especially when it comes to software patents.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I had to check the document date to make sure this wasnt a joke. How do we expect that the patent office will be able to take these peer patent reviews seriously? How will this stand up in a court of law?
Seems a bit shaky.
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
Is the program itself patented? :)
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
...as thousands of nerds choke on their breakfast upon realizing that the USPTO finally read their comments on Slashdot.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
If they use a moderation system similar to slashdot's, there's no way it can fail!
;)
Finally, a fair, completely unbiased way to moderate things...just like on Wikipedia
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Couldn't spot any reference to payment for reviewers on the site. What would be good to see (if it doesn't already exist) is a fine for anyone submitting a dodgy patent, which could go towards a reward for the reviewer(s) that spot the problems with it.
This will no doubt help matters, but still the burden of this work is being put on the wrong people. It should be on those who want the patent in the first place.
If an existing patent grant is subsequently overturned for reasons that the applicant could reasonably discovered themselves then they should be penalised. It should be expected that the applicant has searched exhaustively (or at least as much as can be reasonably expected) before applying in the first place. Why should anyone else have to bear that burden?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Also since the patent workers are "underpaid and overwhelmed" they could hire more and pay them more. Then they'd get better results.
Also they should team up with the EU. There's no need to have two patent offices both looking at the same things.
While I have doubts about how much power the reviewers will have, and more importantly, questions about how much emphasis will be placed on the solidarity of the results of the reviews; soley based on the face value, I find myself vocalising a resounding NSFW: "Fuck Yeah".
I think the program is a great idea, but it is ***optional*** even if it loses its pilot status and becomes a permanent program. I dont think you will see many patentees rushing to sign their applications up for the program, unless the patent applications are likely to cover valuable inventions (having peer review allows the best references to be considered by the USPTO, thereby strengthening any patent that issues).
Even if the peer review program became mandatory for all applications, who in the public is going to take the time to review 1,000 patent applications a week, search for prior art, and send the relevant art to the USPTO? Patent examiners are paid to perform this task (read patent applications and search for prior art), and their work product is usually half-assed (which results in bad patents being issued).
A better solution would be to allow more effective post-grant oppositions (as in Europe) and to allow the public to submit relevant art to the patent office at any time regarding any patent application (current rules only allow the public to submit prior art regarding pending applications during certain limited periods).
How is Ethel suposed to research that for() loop patent? I think they stamp software patents based on a drinking game...
My first response was: THANK FUCKING GOD!!! (that got me into a bit of trouble in the university's copmuter lab, but at least my students can't fail me.
My second response was that, like WalMart's Wikipedia page, this will be taken over by the evil masses of paid-for goons.
Andy Out!
What makes you think this will improve matters? Who exactly is going to go reading patents and reviewing them for the patent office?
Lawyers? No... they'd be much more interested in spending their time on similar work that they actually get paid for.
Developers/scientists/engineers? No... (AFAIK, IANAL) most legal advice suggests that you shouldn't go reading about patents in your field, and instead just read patents whenever they become relevant to you. (when you're being sued for infringement, for example)
I struggle to see how the patent office is going to get much out of this. I also struggle to see why people should contribute (without being paid) to such a broken system. Contributing in this way will not make the system any less broken. It will more likely just make it a bit easier to keep running it.
It is astonishing to me that USPTO might be getting a bit of a clue after decades of sucking. They deserve our applause and our help; remember, we're the ones who have been so pissed at them for screwing up the software industry. They look sincere, so bury the hatchet and edit that wiki!
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I'd yell at people to RTFA, but the article gets it wrong, too. The reality isn't "USPTO to Use Peer to Patent Program" but "Some random article from a law school proposes USPTO should Use Peer to Patent Program".
This is an interesting idea, but nothing more than that; an idea.
Take it easy. It's a startup. Let the experiment run for a bit.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I'm wondering how long it'll be before IBM hunts down prior art for all of SCO's patents.
This is the one time I wish "utilizing a Wiki as a means for collaboration" would be patented by someone. Then that someone would sue the USPTO for infringing a patent they granted in the first place! Talk about COOL!!! :)))
OK, I'm VERY aware that this didn't make any sense. Nothing to flame here, please move along.
for patents issued by Microsoft and other "evil" companies since there is plenty of haters out there to peer review those applications. The "less important companies and individuals will still get by though.
The proven level of quality of Wikipedia.org suggests this is an interesting, but not inherently good, idea. Rather than "peer review", a Wiki would be better suited for a "Public Comment" area. It's a matter of setting the proper expectations: public comment is what is really happening here in the general case, and hopefully it's "informed public comment". Formal peer review tends to be picky; public comment can be icky.
It's a a neat experiment, but having only quickly skimmed some of the wiki at jot.com, I wonder if the proponents have looked carefully at the prior art, e.g.: en.wikipedia.org. And the jot.com site seems to be holding up so far.
"Peer to Patent" is a pretty lame euphemism. Sounds more like "Patent Invalidation Program" would be a better name. Or perhaps, "Finally Getting Around to Cleaning Up The FUD."
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
Just in time for Wal-Mart's patent claim on the smiley face.
I bet the first entry will be made by Forrest Gump.
Next step: Close up shop, turn off lights.
What if, in the efforts to stop a flood of bad patents, the USPTO runs astray of a patent themselves (likely on something commonly used). As the USPTO I suppose the could revoke the patent in question?
Python code of a perfect peer to patent program:
def filterPatents (patents):
return []
Well, maybe we aren't that lucky, but it is always a beginning to get rid of the most stupid patents.
Actually, no. This is a pilot program. From the USPTO website:
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will hold a briefing on May 12, 2006, from 9:00 a.m. to noon in the agency's Madison building, 600 Dulany Street, Alexandria, VA. The USPTO has created a partnership with academia and the private sector to launch an online, peer review pilot project that seeks to ensure that patent examiners will have improved access to all available prior art during the patent examination process.
As a follow-up to the February 16th meeting, this briefing will focus on further developing previously discussed initiatives as well as answering the question of what constitutes valid prior art and a greater in-depth analysis of the peer review pilot project that is under consideration.
The meeting is open to the public. However, space is limited so please register early. Only the first 220 registrations can be accepted.
The article links to the registration page, so it's a bit confusing.
You could have the inventor post a bond, say $100 per claim. Any 3rd party that submits prior art that shows the claim to be overly broad could recieve the $100 as a bounty. If the inventor wishes to rewrite the claim and resubmit (currently allowed with patents), it would be an additional $100 per claim.
This helps in 2 ways: by making it per claim, inventors will think carefully before submitting a long list of claims. And it directly rewards 3rd parties, very likely some Indian or Chinese guy using the system to make a few extra bucks.
Note: There are probably a number of variations, such as $1000 per independent claim, $20 per dependent. Stuff like that. The Indepented:Dependent ration is about 1:10 and it's the independents that matter anyway.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Well, I'm actually going to the meeting, and from what I understand, that write-up is incorrect (or misleading). The agenda we have calls for the proposal to be presented further, and the pilot program to be looked at by the USPTO. It may end up being an actual pilot program, but at this point it is only a proposal, and the wiki just some guy with a web site.
Always be polite.
I hope they emply some sort of karma system to weed out the valdals submitting false reports of prior art and to elevate the opinions of individuals who consistently provide useful information.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
Okay, now I'M confused. Thanks for that. I sent in a request to join the meeting so hopefully everything can be clarified.
So, other people do their work for them? I realize they're understaffed and could use some help, but really, this is the best they could come up with? I have an idea: I'll outsource all of you guys to do my job. Between school and work, I'm understaffed, and this way, things get done better. I'll even implement a peer-review moderation system. It's win-win!
Okay, can someone type in all of Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" into the wiki? That'll pre-empt any further software patents.
I suppose someone could mass-load the project description for every SourceForge project that actually released a file, just to be safe.
There, no more software patents. Prior art is established.
A.
So the Patent Office is basically saying they can't do their job, and they want free help.
1905 would have been about the last time Patent clerks had spare time.
And even that German guy got out of the business eventually, and found better things to do.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I meant to mod "Insightful", but I was careless. And no way to undo or mod again AFAICT. So I gave you a +1 for your (genuinely informative) ethanol post instead. So sorry dude.
On the contrary, I much prefer a patchwork, redundant, basically ineffective system, similar to what we have now viewed internationally, than the sort of international entity you'd get if it was designed in the current climate. At least today if you really don't like the IP laws in the U.S., you can go to Russia, Sweden, or China; true national "harmonization," which would be the first step towards any sort of international patent/trademark/copyright office, would remove the last holdouts that haven't submitted to the Disney/Vivendi/**AA view of reality. Any new system that would be created today, would be built to their specifications, full stop: they are that powerful, and the stakes would be that high.
I have no doubt that, given the opportunity, some of the finest minds at the large corporations of the world would love to design an international Patent Office. I'm also sure that it would be ruthlessly efficient at transferring the rights of individuals to the media conglomerates, and carving the IP landscape up into chunks to be divided between its corporate masters, into monopolies that would last until the end of time.
On the whole, I much prefer our current mess: sometimes bureucratic inefficiency is perferable to the creation of a juggernaut, and I fear that's what you'd get if you concentrated power in a single place in the pursuit of efficiency.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I thought that if you post a non-anon post anyplace in the discution your mods are cleared from that topic. Not sure on that though.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The USPTO is underfunded because the government TAKES money from the patent application fees. If this is remotely sucessful, the government will just take more money out of the USPTO.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Walmart is not asking for a patent, they're asking for a trademark.
It's not that the patent office didn't have a clue. It's that they didn't have the RESOURCES, or the TECHNOLOGY.
The job of the patent examiner sucks. If the technology to do this had been available earlier, I'm sure they would have done it earlier. I doubt they have any desire to maintain the current state of suckiness, as the people it sucks the most for is them.
paintball
This infringes on my patent for "A System of Peer Evaluation of Prior Art of Patent Applications". The USPTO will be hearing from my lawyers!
paintball
Anybody with points to spare? Post-grant oppositions need more viability here.
I don't know what kind of vacuum/entry machine the USPTO has, but they DESPERATELY need some access to those image-searching progrmas that can look at a part and determine in HOW MANY OTHER PRODUCTS that similar shape was submitted. Then, separately, scan for the FUNCTION, then for the END RESULT or TARGET.
The USPTO needs to abolish slithery, slick-ass, artful description of what is being claimed, described, saved, or such. These lame-assed, defensive, obtuse, and devious types of filings not only dramatically increase the workload of the paid patent researchers, but it mind-numbingly raises the cost for entrepreneurs who ought NOT have to (if they don't WANT to) rely upon patent attorneys.
I know how to use a simple database, like Approach. If I use a few non-letter characters before, after, or before and after a single letter, a phrase, or such, I can find something in a text field. The USPTO search, while functional, makes me feel it has a toy front end to whet the appetite of the casual searcher, who then quickly is submerged in 2,658 to 4 millions of pointless, unrelated replies. It's almosts as if HR Block's former IRS employees lobbied the IRS to make filing just painful enough that self-filers relent and go to a paid preparer, just to keep their cottage industry alive. That's how I feel the USPTO search page is functioning. I could be wrong, but that's how I FEEL based on my pedestrian and semi-serious searches on a few single words and a few phrases. It's disillusioning and heartbreaking. It makes me feel steamrolled and that I MUST rely on a patent attorney. If I could JUST FIND all the relevant stuff and one by one single them out on my own, I could then use the approved esoteric verbiage to cherry pick the limitations, permissions, and restrictions I feel comfortable with.
WHY can't the filing be like a recipe? Or like a buffet?
- Do you want restrictive licensing?
- In what state are you filing?
- Are you seeking global or local protection or a hybrid of the two?
- Are you the ONLY person legally entitled to make decisions about this patent if it is successfully awarded/assigned to you?
- Please examine and pick from one or more of the following loose, strong, and highly-restrictive types of language you wish to structure your patent in the event searchers wish to license or purchase rights to or ownership of your patent:
- blah
- blah
- blah
I HOPE that is in the works with this new interface.
I HOPE post-grant reviews and nullifications can be automated to quickly whack and suspend illegally or ineptly or dubiously granted patents. It would (well, maybe it would) be NICE if many of these patents conflicts could be shunted over to the various business schools, sort of like using the professors AND students to anonymously rate and recommend or revoke conflicting patents that should not have been granted.
This could sort of be like a Patent Corps to augment the USPTO. BUT, it MUST be anonymous so that corporations that would normally hire these law and patent grads will not be able to slam them with punative hire rejections. A non-camera, hooded, non-diebold kiosk JUST might work, especially if the citizen reviewer enters the booth hooded, latex-gloved, and wearing a DNA-containing bunny suit to make identification nearly impossible (they'd ALL have to be suited up, put into a dark room where even UV tracking won't work, and then when the last review is punched in, the group is shuffled around in the dark before allowed to leave the review room. That would SEROUSLY screw up any tracking efforts.
Just some off-ideas.... I don't think they've been patented, so I reserve the right to repeat this text anyPLACe, anyTIME, even if you patent it. I've got the copyright, and the law is (as of this writing) on MY SIDE!
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
You're right... I get a warning: "You've Already Moderated this Discussion. If you continue to post this comment, all moderations done to this discussion will be undone! Are you sure you want to post?"
Thanks for the tip.
Mod patent up!
It's good that they are thinking in this direction, but I think this is a two-edged sword. In the end, identifying patents is a lot of work; who is going to sit in front of the Wiki every day and weed out one bad patent after another? Maybe companies will do it for their own products, maybe not.
Also, if the site gets used a lot, there are going to be many comments on approvable patents, and many valid comments questioning the validity of a patent application will require quite a bit of work to understand and verify. So, this still means a lot of effort for the USPTO; in fact, it probably means more work to do right than they are willing to invest right now.
If a bad patent isn't caught at that stage for whatever reason, then the people obtaining the patent will have an even stronger case: "look, not only did the patent examiners look at it, the public had a chance to review it, too, and there were no objections back then".
If the geeks of this world get together some kind of organization (informal or formal) to review these patents and ensure that the USPTO at least gets a lot of good comments. Furthermore, the comments should become part of the record of the patent application so that they can be reviewed later by a judge, who might then have more support to decide that a patent never should have been granted in the first place.
Maybe as some fellow slashdotters out there say, it is about time. But, my problem is that they are asking people to do what the patent office is paid to do. As the article says, Because the USPTO usually does not have the manpower and time to thoroughly check every patent that comes into the office, many are unjustly rubber stamped. So maybe they should hire more people to research and issue patents. Or failing that, stop rubber stamping whatever comes across their desk. If they can't do their jobs properly, the entire lot of them should be fired and people that can do the work be hired.
They are asking you to do their jobs. Jobs they are paid to do. Am I the only one that sees something wrong with that?
What if one day all the garbagemen, sorry sanitation engineers, across the country said "Sorry, we don't have enough time to stop at everyone's house and collect the trash. So we are setting up a Peer-to-dump service. You haul your own trash, and your neighbor's trash too if you wouldn't mind, to the dump and tell us how much you took there. We'd really appreciate it, thanks."
Current patent system is busted, IMHO. They need to simply reduce the cost, and rename it to "Patent registration stage 1". Perhaps they can place a limit to the amount of liability stage 1 can bear. Then they can create an improved version on top of this for the "real" patents. Trying to fix a system that is broken will always introduce loopholes.
... he didn't want to infringe on the patent I own, called "A mechanism to improve the relevance of electronic bulletin board comments via reading TFA."