USPTO Peer Review Process To Begin Soon

An anonymous reader writes "As we've discussed several times before on Slashdot, the US patent office is looking to employ a Wiki-like process for reviewing patents. It's nowhere near as open as Wikipedia, but there are still numerous comparisons drawn to the well-known project in this Washington Post story. Patent office officials site the huge workload their case officers must deal with in order to handle the modern cycle of product development. Last year some 332,000 applications were handled by only 4,000 employees. 'The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics. Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome.'"

Comments

well..

[mastershake_phd]

How about some common sense. For one thing the applications are overly complex if you ask me. I bet amazons one-click patent app was over ten pages. You read ten pages on making a one-click-super-ecommerce-solution and you might think it was a complex patentable idea. Well, maybe you wouldnt but someone there does.

Thats not the same thing

[cliffski]

His points defend the principle of patents. You are attacking certain abuses of the patent system. These are different arguments. I believe in democracy as a principle, but if 51% of the country voted that black people should be tortured, I would be against it. I'm in favour of the principle of the free market, but if some people lie starving in the street because they have no job or skills, I'm against that.
Patents are like anything else, there are abuses of the system, and extremes that can be cited, but in principle, we are better off with patents and copyright than we would be without them. The problematic cases and implementations need fixing, but don't throw out the whole system because parts of it need work.
It's easy to say "do away with it all". Its much harder to say what you would replace it with.

Re:How Wonderful, M$ Employees Will Be Doing This

[swillden]

If we let Microsoft employees do this work for the Patent Office, I can only imagine what sorts of patents are going to get approved. M$ will have every patent under the sun. Somehow, I don't think letting huge corporate interests "assist" the government would make the process better.

I read TFA, and I don't see how that could happen.

The system doesn't allow MS employees (or anyone other than patent office employees) to approve patent applications, or even support them. The only thing that can be done through the wiki is to offer evidence of prior art that may invalidate the patent applications.

Of course, MS employees could try to invalidate all of, say, IBM's patent applications, or opponents of patents in general could try to invalidate everyone's applications, perhaps even submitting bogus prior art. That's why they're trying to create a reputation system, initially determining the weight to give a particular submission by the submitter's academic and professional credentials and then after the system has been running for a while using submission history -- favoring the submissions of those who have submitted solid prior art citations in the past.

I don't see any way this won't be an improvement over the present system.

It also doesn't appear to me that the submitters will be limited to employees of the listed corporations. Based on my reading of the article, it sounds like anyone who has the relevant qualifications will be able to participate. IBM, MS, etc. have volunteered to pay some of their employees to participate. It's rather obvious that they would want to, actually. It's much cheaper to invalidate other companies' patents before they're granted than to fight them in court afterward. It would be a good idea for the OSTG to pay a couple people to participate as well, focused on invalidating patents that may represent a risk to open source.

Re:while they are at it...

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

> Last year some 332,000 applications were handled by only 4,000 employees.

332,000 / 4000 = 83 patents per year per employee.

83 / 2000 hours/year = 0.0415 patents per hour, or about 24 hours per patent.

Granted, a number of employees are secretaries and useless managers, but they should be pushing the bulk of the boilerplate anyway, leaving the examiners to devote most of their time to actual examining.

I call shenanigans* !

* shenanigan n Standard government waste.