Slashdot Mirror
Crowdsourcing Site Offers Rewards To Bust Patents
holy_calamity writes "Article One Partners is a new startup that offers $50,000 rewards to people that find prior art for certain valuable patents. The company's founder told New Scientist she thought the initiative would improve 'patent quality' by increasing scrutiny on poor patents. She aims to profit by selling the information contributors collect, or trade stocks based on it. Current patents they are looking for help to bust include those being used by Konami to sue Harmonix over Rock Band and Guitar Hero."
The patent will have to be revoked and beyond legal appeals to get the reward.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Why not go after patent trolls (there's prior art to his 'prior art'!) instead of companies who actually developed a product and patented it?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Not quite like ambulance chasing. This is a reward for helping to see that the patent system gets the information it needs to work as it was designed. That is like outsourcing patent examiners, in an after the fact mode.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
In an alternate universe where ambulance chasing improves the quality of patents, sure.
Because clearly, getting paid to write about penises on a non-work related website via a network where text is much easier to sniff than pixels is OK with the company.
For something to be considered prior art it must have been publicly available in some form. For example, a released product is prior art, a prototype or in-house product is not. A paper published in a journal is prior art, a internal whitepaper or lab notebook is not.
While the courts to accept internal schematics, code and documentation as evidence that a released product is implemented in a certain way and thus prior art for a certain patent, they would not consider a product that has never been released as prior art.
That is what the first-to-file rules changed - when multiple people apply for overlapping patents all the other internal documentation that is not considered prior art is now only looked at if it was created within a year before the patent was filed. In the past it was looked at much farther back to determine who invented a product first, but only in the case of multiple filers. Even before the change, it wasn't prior art, and thus couldn't invalidate a patent if the other party never filed for a patent.
it's really not much different from how public oversight usually works. since we can't all be involved in every single government decision as they're being made, public oversight allows the public to correct mistakes made by government officials after the fact. this allows the collective wisdom of a larger group of people to be employed without hampering the day to day operations of government.
however, it's probably better if the USPTO offered these rewards instead of a private company. this way when a bad patent is found they can trace it back to the patent examiner who granted the patent. also, they could track which companies have a habit of submitting bogus patents and integrate this information in the patent approval process. if a company repeated submits bogus patent applications then perhaps they should be banned from applying for any more patents in the future.
critics of this approach are probably right that the USPTO needs to correct its own internal problems, though i'd say they need to improve patent examiner training and raise the hiring standards rather than just increasing the number of patent officers they their employ. and in the end, there's really no substitute for a system of public oversight.
[Amplitude copied Beatmania] badly too.
You may have a point there. But Parappa the Rapper was released in Japan in December 1996, a year before Beatmania. Which Konami game did it copy? Likewise, Bust a Groove was out ten months before DDR 1st Mix.