Peer-to-Patent

The Peer To Patent project is an initiative that seeks to assist patent offices in improving patent quality by gathering public input in a structured, productive manner. Peer To Patent is the first social-software project directly linked to decision-making by the federal government.
An initial pilot project in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was completed June 15, 2009. That pilot examined more than 220 patent applications in the fields of software and business methods. The Peer To Patent project has issued two anniversary reports from the initial pilot ( and), and a final report from the initial pilot is pending.
Following the conclusion of the initial pilot the USPTO undertook an evaluation of Peer To Patent assisted by students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. That evaluation concluded that the program had merit and should be continued. On October 19, 2010, the USPTO and New York Law School jointly announced a new pilot program commencing October 25, 2010, and continuing through September 30, 2011 (with the review period extending through December 31, 2011). This new pilot will not only include patent applications covering subject matter included in the initial pilot, it will now include telecommunications, speech recognition, translation, biotechnology, bioinformatics and biopharmaceuticals.
Other patent offices involved in pilot programs include IP Australia, the Japan Patent Office, and the Korean Intellectual Property Office. The UK Intellectual Property Office announced on November 4, 2010, that it would commence a pilot in 2011 and the pilot commenced on 1 June 2011.
Justification and purpose.
Patents go to the heart of invention, a key driver of technological progress and economic vitality. When the patent system functions correctly, it rewards only meritorious inventions—those that are useful, novel, and not obvious. This in turn encourages more people to exercise their ingenuity and effort to create new inventions. However, for a proper balance to be struck, the system must avoid awarding patents to discourage inventions that lack merit. When the system becomes inconsistent in recognizing true invention, inappropriately issued patents become obstacles for innovation in that technology area. This raises, directly or indirectly, the costs of doing business in that particular area.
The number of patents in the most active jurisdictions (including the ones piloting Peer-to-Patent) has grown over the past few decades.
The rise in patent applications has also placed stress on the patent offices themselves. For example, the USPTO October 31, 2010 had a backlog of about 700,000 patent applications, which is one and a half times the highest number of applications the USPTO has processed in any given year.
Peer To Patent is focused on helping patent offices perform high-quality examinations of pending patent applications by enlisting the public to help find "and explain" prior art. Prior art are references that predate the date of conception of at least some of the features of a given claimed invention. Prior art can include earlier patents, academic papers, magazine articles, web pages, and even physical examples. Patent examiners compare a claimed invention with the prior art to determine if a given invention is both new (i.e. novel) and not obvious to a person of ordinary skill and creativity of the invention.
Prior to the initiation of Peer To Patent, U.S. patent examiners had the sole responsibility for searching for prior art. Patent examiners have a time budget of a few hours in which to conduct such searches. Peer To Patent attempts to improve the patent process by markedly expanding the prior art search. The reasoning behind the project is that if prior art exists for an invention, particularly non-patent prior art, someone in the world knows about it. This knowledgeable person may be a competitor in the same field, a student or professor, or the owner of an earlier embodiment of the invention. Peer To Patent encourages such people to submit examples of prior art and creates communities of people worldwide who are interested in discovering prior art.
Peer To Patent uses social software features to facilitate discussion amongst groups of volunteer experts. Users can upload prior art references, participate in discussion forums, rate other user submissions, add research references, invite others, and more. This helps the examiners focus their attention on the submission(s) of prior art that have the highest relevance to an application.
Theoretical underpinnings.
An understanding of Peer To Patent's philosophical basis is valuable in order to comprehend its operation. The project also has a technological basis, lying in the potential for Internet technologies to structure public input into government processes much more effectively than agencies and legislators have done in the past. Thus, Peer to Patent is more than an intervention into the patent system; it serves as a demonstration of the potential to bring the public more fully into its own governance.
Attempts to involve the public in government decision-making (other than voting and referenda, which are frequently powerful, but are also intermittent and very restrictive of the public's capacity for subtle, expressive input) previously fell into two categories, both usually of minimal impact:
The paradigm underlying Peer To Patent is relatively novel, and involves clear goals, direction, and structure. The model is related, however, to many notions of civil society, particularly the theories deliberative democracy, communicative action (Jürgen Habermas), and strong democracy (Benjamin Barber). The more immediate underpinnings are best described in a series of papers by the creator of Peer to Patent, Beth Simone Noveck of New York Law School. Relevant papers include:
The promise of Peer To Patent also draws on the success of various other movements that have created effective, productive communities on the Internet from far-flung individuals: free software and open-source software development, peer-to-peer systems for the collaborative sharing of data and computer processing, and Wikipedia.
Operation of the project.
The process described in this section is that used for the USPTO pilot.
Patent applicants.
The USPTO pilot, officially announced in the USPTO's Official Gazette of 26 June 2007, was initially restricted to patent applications from Technology Center 2100 (Computer Architecture, Software and Information Security) that are voluntarily submitted to the project by the owner/assignee. The extended pilot has expanded to include so-called Business Methods patents (class 705) that fall under Technology Center 3600.
To be eligible for Peer To Patent review, a patent application must be filed during the period covered by the pilot. Furthermore, the USPTO tries to provide a representative sample of current patents by limiting the number of applications from any given applicant.
Incentives for submitting an application to the project include:
Applicants follow a procedure described on the project's web site to submit patent applications for review.
Community review.
After a patent is published on the Peer To Patent web site, the public can post not only instances of possible prior art, but other useful comments such as common industry terms that might describe the patent. These terms, or Folksonomy tags, are useful to help other experts find prior art. The review process emphasizes and supports group collaboration in the following ways.
The office action.
The role of the patent examiner in Peer To Patent remains the same as with traditional applications, except that Peer to Patent applications move to the head of the queue, to reward patent applicants who participate, and the patent examiner is forwarded the ten highest rated submissions of prior art from the Peer To Patent community to aid in their examination.
Governance.
The Peer To Patent project is an independent project set up by New York Law School and operated through the school's Center for Patent Innovations. An agreement between the USPTO and Peer To Patent allows the project to submit prior art to USPTO examiners.
The steering committee includes patent attorneys from major patent-holding companies. The computer industry provides most of the steering committee members, since the initial pilot focused on Technology Center 2100.
Peer To Patent is funded by project sponsors and by the USPTO. The sponsors include:
Technology.
Except where noted, content on the site is available for noncommercial use through a Creative Commons license.
A description of the technology used on the site is stated in their first anniversary report, 
Future evolution.
The success of the initial pilot will likely lead to a gradual expansion of Peer To Patent to cover more and more categories of patents; for example the second U.S. pilot has been expanded to include speech recognition, telecommunications, biotechnology, and bioinformatics. Channels, standards, and protocols will be created to let inventors and other participants in the process integrate their own data and work flows.
One feature of the Peer To Patent site allows participants to rate each other's comments, just as they now rate each other's prior art submissions. A future stage of the project may allow patent examiners to consult the public during the office action, so that the public not only submits prior art but helps examiners better understand the relevant subject matter.
More broadly, Peer To Patent shows how the public can become more self-governing by interacting in an organized manner with government officials. Elements of this interaction include:
Evaluation.
As of November 24, 2010, there had been 557,560 page views from 114,395 unique viewers in 173 countries or territories. More than 2, 800 people signed up to be reviewers.
Up-to-date statistics about the number of patent applications submitted to Peer To Patent, the number of community participants searching for prior art, and the amount of discussion around each patent can be obtained from the Peer To Patent web site.
Some highlights from the First Anniversary report:
Criticisms.
Criticism of the Peer to Patent project range from its goals to its likelihood of success. For instance, criticisms can be found in comments posted to two articles favorable to Peer To Patent on the well-known Patently Obvious (Patently-O) blog: articles about the announced launch and the actual launch of the pilot.
Here is a sampling of objections aired in various forums: