Moving up to the modern age
Open Call From the Patent Office
The government is about to start opening up the process of reviewing patents to the modern font of wisdom: the Internet.
The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency’s examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.
“For the first time in history, it allows the patent-office examiners to open up their cubicles and get access to a whole world of technical experts,” said David J. Kappos, vice president and assistant general counsel at IBM.
The new patent system will try to help separate experts from posers by offering extensive details about the people sending information to the site. To help others evaluate the quality of this information, called prior art, each posting will include several measures gauging the quality of his other contributions to the site. Patent examiners, for instance, will award “gold stars” to people who previously submitted the most useful information for judging earlier applications, Noveck said.
Whoot!
This will be interesting, but as anyone who’s used the USPTO’s online patent or trademark databases knows, the PTO does a poor job of running its websites. Given the administration/moderation effort something like this will require, it’ll probably be even worse.
Hey, the gubment’s great at building computer systems! For example, consider the FBI’s Virtual Case File system.
Oh yeah, that fell through — with a larger budget, and more important goals riding on it. On the other hand, it was a relational database — and those can be tough to build (for amateurs, the first time).
Wow, good to see they actually thought through the plan. I saw this title and instantly thought they where just going to create a crappy digg clone, bootstrap it onto their current engine and make it a corporate race to get the most people spamming it and trying to get their patents approved and their opponents denied. Though that will still be a problem, I think they actually have a chance of making this system give more value then it costs. Now if they actually pull this off then I will might gain a slight bit of respect for the intelligence of our government and might actually gain back all the respect I lost of the patent system.