Patent review by the public

From en.swpat.org

(Note: Risks of supporting partial solutions)

The idea of community patent review is that people who are afraid of patents should review patent applications themselves, inform the patent office about prior-art, and request reviews of patents that seem to fail the "newness" criteria of patentability.

Contents 1 Limits to effectiveness 2 Example: peer-to-patent 3 Related pages on en.swpat.org 4 External links

[edit] Limits to effectiveness

1. If the patent office has a policy of accepting software patents, then there will often be no grounds for an external reviewer to complain about any particular software patent application.
2. The patent holder will be given the opportunity to rewrite their patent to avoid the complaint, so unless the complaint completely invalidates the application, the result could be the granting of a stronger patent.
3. Participating in the review costs time. We thus give our resources to solve a problem that shouldn't exist, and the resources we give will never be acknowledged.

[edit] Example: peer-to-patent

(This is an updated version of an explanation by Ben Klemens^[1])

According to Bessen and Hunt (page 47), about 70 software patents are granted by the USPTO per day.

Meanwhile, the Peer-to-patent project reports that as of May 11th 2008, they have gotten 183 items of prior art submitted on 56 applications.[1] The project opened in June 2007, so in eleven months they have been able to advise about six hours worth of output from the USPTO.

[edit] Related pages on en.swpat.org

• Duds and non-solutions

[edit] External links

• Christopher Wong describes the peer-to-patent project
• Wikipedia: Peer-to-patent
• Japanese patent office trials peer-to-patent
  • Also: (in Japanese) Links to original, official document (^[?] English translations: Google, Babelfish)
• Peer-to-patent's introductory page
• USPTO likely to adopt 'peer-to-patent', February 2010
• Another example: http://www.innovationcommons.org/