RSS
Twitter
Peer-To-Patent Quietly Shuts Down
from the and-no-one-notices... dept
While I'm certainly a big fan of involving more people in the process of reviewing patents, I've been a huge skeptic of the "Peer-to-Patent" program that the USPTO tested over the past few years. As I noted earlier, there's very little incentive for most people to actually get involved in peer reviewing a patent that early on. It's only much later when the patent actually becomes an issue (i.e., someone is asserting it somehow) that it really becomes an issue (especially when they're claiming it covers something that appears to be totally unrelated). However, there were many who promoted peer-to-patent as some sort of savior of the patent system.
And yet... the entire program apparently shut down last month and almost no one noticed (thanks to Eric Goldman for sending this over). They claim that the program is being "reviewed," but no more patents are being accepted into the program, and the few that are already in are expected to be finished in the next few months.
Again, having multiple people look in on patents is a good idea, but the setup of this particular program was incredibly flawed from the very start. There wasn't much incentive to participate from either end, and so the program didn't go very far or come up with very much useful. Also, it focused too much on "prior art" as an indicator of "obviousness" when the two are separate things (though, they may be related). It's great that the USPTO was open to experiments on improving patent quality, but this one never seemed to have much going for it.
