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."

Comments

Infant Stage

[eldavojohn]

I think that the Wiki is really in its infant stage as there's not much on it. A lot of times, don't they take a huge body of documents and then write an ingestor application to seed a serious Wiki?

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:

The patent system is broken. The Constitution intended for patents to foster innovation and the promotion of progress in the useful arts. Instead, the Patent Office creates uncertainty and monopoly. Underpaid and overwhelmed examiners struggle under the burden of 350,000 applications per year and a mounting backlog of 600,000. Increasingly patents are approved for unmerited inventions. What if we could make it easier to ensure that only the most worthwhile inventions got twenty years of monopoly rights? What if we could offer a way to protect the inventor's investment while still safeguarding the marketplace of ideas from bad inventions? What if we could make informed decisions about scientifically complex problems before the fact, rather than trying to reform the system ex post? What if we could harness collective intelligence to replace bureaucracy?

This Article argues that we should reform the patent system by re-designing the institution of patent examination. Our existing legal mechanisms for awarding the patent monopoly are constructed around the outdated assumption that only expert bureaucrats can produce dispassionate decisions in the public interest. Building upon what we have learned from online and off-line systems of collaboration, we can now use the tools available to combine the wisdom of expert scientific communities of practice with the legal determinations of a trained Patent Office staff.

This Article proposes the creation of a peer review online system to help the Patent Examiner find the right prior art and access those experts who can advise on how to apply it. This new mechanism for collaborative expertise provides an avenue for reform that requires minimal statutory change while improving the quality of patents. We have arrived at a unique moment in history when four factors converge to make this reform possible: first, the state of patenting has become so problematic as to meet with almost universal opprobrium; second, patent applications are published after eighteen months independent of grant, making it possible to consider open peer review; third, we now have the technology to make peer review on this scale possible; and fourth, we have experience both with offline peer review and with online systems for collaborative decision making that provide the empirical understanding of how to re-construct our intellectual property institutions. This Article not only argues for such an institutional re-design, it provides a blueprint for the pilot that the United States Patent Office has agreed to implement. This proposal has implications beyond the patent process. It may enable us to contribute to the design of other social systems that depend upon the collaboration of experts across a distance, providing ways to improve policymaking, deepen democracy and rethink our fundamental assumptions about governance.

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

Re:Two words:

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

I think that's the point.

...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.

Headline should include the word "Proposal"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:"underpaid and overwhelmed"

[Anonymous Coward]

Also since the patent workers are "underpaid and overwhelmed" they could hire more and pay them more.

I completely agree. The USPTO has been making record amounts of money since they introduced the "patent everything" policy. But this isn't the USPTO's call; the profits go to the treasury and get spent on other crap.

Re:Headline should NOT include the word "Proposal"

[Nananine]

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.

Re:"underpaid and overwhelmed"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow this is just a ton of misinformation.

It wasn't hard to figure out why, they were offering salaries nearly $15k lower than the competition. A CS/EE Master's degree and a 3.9-4.0 GPA would earn you something like $56k.

You found places at the career fair that were offering MS grads $70k? Handing out jobs? Working at the patent office also pretty much guarentees that you'll be given a 5-8% raise per year until you're GS-14, with a 9% annual bonus, and they'll promote you into a GS-15 spot in management. At that point you'll be making in the range of $115-135k, enjoying something like 15 federal holidays plus 24 vacation days per year, and all before the age of 30. It's not being a movie star, but damn if you know of better bet then let us all know. I am on schedule to make 6 figures before I'm 30 years old and I dropped out of grad school to work there.

To make matters worse, the job is awful. You are given x number of patents a week, period. Whether or not you finish them you're still getting them piled on you. It's just one after the other, like sorting mail your whole life. They tried to make it sound exciting, but it just wasn't.

This isn't exactly true either. It IS true that some people can't keek up with the work load. Find me a place to work where that isn't true. Most of the people I know set their own schedule after 9-12 months on the job and take every other Friday off because they AREN'T being worked to death. (I don't tend to socialize much with the lower percentiles. There are people who work 13 out of 14 days straight.)

I spoke with some people who worked at the USPTO. They hated their lives. Their technical skills went completely to waste and they quickly learned you either become a patent lawyer or you flounder and die.

Well I spoke with some people who worked there too... They decided that they hated writing countless lines of code in a cubicle trying to meet someone else's deadline with someone watching when they clocked in and out. If you're competent at what you do at the USPTO it's a cakewalk. You work like a consultant. Set your own schedule, manage your own workflow, know without any question when you will be promoted, and for some people, work in an area that they never knew they loved. But of course, that's not everyone.

This grim picture is all the USPTO has to offer to incoming recruits, and no wonder they are understaffed. Lousy patents making it through the system makes sense when you're reduced to hiring the desperate and underqualified. That's why I'm excited about this program. It allows others to help make decisions and provide insight rather than placing the entire burden on an underpaid, understaffed government office. A much needed change.

I won't speak of the incoming recruits. There are issues there. I can't fathom why you're "excited about this program" - you cite a non sequitur. You can provide all the "prior art" you want. Many people provide the examiners with 1000 pages of "prior art" when they file their applications. It will still be the same patent examiners making the decisions.

This notion that the USPTO is underpaid and understaffed is simply based on fantasy. There ARE people there, as in any government agency or corporation, who drag down the average.

If I had to identify the biggest problem with the patent office's perception in communities like Slashdot, it would be without a doubt the rampant and seemingly deliberate ignorance in those communities regarding how the patent system was designed to work, why it was designed so, and how that plays out in practice. Wisecracks and "I'll patent the idea to patent dumb ideas, dur hur" only hurt Slashdot's image in the eyes of industry professionals.

Here's an example. 37 CFR 1.99 has permitted third parties (such as anybody on Slashdot) to submit prior art for any patent application for years. There's prior art for this wiki idea, and it's been around for years. I bet a nickel you didn't know that. ;)