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."

Comments

Re:Maybe I'm missing something . . .

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Well, patent trolling isn't actually illegal, unless you can prove that the troll stepped way over the line in some way. Also, the usual operating mode of patent trolls is to have a lot of patents and no products, so they are largely immune to the infringement countersuits and cross-licensing agreements that keep patent war mostly cold among the big players.

I'd be nice to go after patent trolls; but there really isn't much to get them on. They've come up with ways to game the system, with undesirable effects; but they aren't(usually) actually violating any law you could get them on.

A lot of prior art is proprietary.

[Richard Steiner]

I've had access to millions of LOC over the years that I couldn't legally release as proof of prior art without getting corporate legal involved, and that's usually not a trivial undertaking.

I'm not sure $50k is worth potentially trashing a career.

There are hundreds if not thousands of companies out there that have written software in-house for decades, and I'm guessing most are in the same boat.