Uncle Sam(’s Patent and Trademark Office) needs YOU!
by Colin Dodd
Your country needs you.
To dig themselves out of the 20-year hole dug by a burgeoning technology industry and years of neglect from within government, the beleaguered United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is enlisting the help of The Community Patent Review project, a fledgling peer-to-peer patent review system founded by The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and sponsored by some of the biggest players in the technology sector. (Yes, Red Hat is among them.) The pilot program starts in June. You can register to be a Community Peer Reviewer now.
In light of two recent Supreme Court patent decisions, judgements about “obviousness” and “prior art” will become more important in pending patent litigation and the Community Patent Review Project is bound to help USPTO determine whether an invention is patent worthy in the first place.
Institute Director, Professor Beth Simone Noveck, explained in a 2006 press release that, “The Community Patent Review pilot project will… take advantage of collaborative, web-based technologies to inform decision-making. In short, reviewers will submit prior art and comment on its relevance to specific parts of the published application. Peer reviewers will rank these submissions so that patent examiners can review the prior art deemed most relevant by the community.”
To find out even more about the project, you can download this 80-page pdf.
