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."Peer To Patent: government using social networking"
An initial pilot project in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was completed June 15, 2009.Press release, "June 15 is Last Day to Submit Applications for Peer Review Pilot" 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 ("First Anniversary Report" and"Second Anniversary Report"), 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."Evaluation of the Peer To Patent Pilot Program" 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."Listing of classes and subclasses qualified for the FY2011 Pilot"
Other patent offices involved in pilot programs include IP Australia (Peer-to-Patent Australia),"Peer To Patent Australia" the Japan Patent Office,"Peer To Patent Japan" 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 referendums, 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:
Free-form online forums. These are useful for the exchange of information, but lack the structures that would permit the formation of coordinated groups and sustained, constructive planning between the public and government officials. Web sites with suggestion forms. These tend to draw ill-considered comments from marginally committed participants, lack mechanisms for follow-through, and provide no support for knowledgeable individuals to coordinate their efforts.
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:
"Democracy of Groups" explains that "self-constituting groups" of volunteers can create value beyond what the individuals in them could accomplish alone. If formed online, such groups require tools to visualize their relationships and formalize contrasting approaches, so the groups can interact productively. New legal categories should also be created to recognize self-constituting groups—just as special categories for corporations now exist—and give them a voice. "Electronic Revolution in Rule-Making" criticizes the doctrine of the "insulated bureaucrat" who has been assumed by governments to be the most effective and impartial judge of policy. The paper calls on more democratic input from "on-going communities of interest and expertise," but explains that government attempts to solicit such input generally fail because there is no process to let communities collaborate on input or to fashion input into a form that policy-makers can use. The article points to effective techniques such as allowing individuals to comment on each other's suggestions, providing tools for collaborative editing to bring up the quality of the suggestions, and allowing discussions with group moderation. Social norms and technological innovations must go hand in hand.
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,USPTO announcement of Peer to Patent Pilot, 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:
Expedited review. Public review begins one month after publication of the application. Review continues for four months, after which the patent examiner conducts an expedited examination of the patent application. Potentially stronger patents. If Peer to Patent review works as expected, patents that survive the process have already undergone considerable scrutiny and will be less at risk of a successful challenge later. Public service. Applicants can feel they are contributing to a valuable experiment in new models and technologies for public decision-making.
Applicants follow a procedure described on the project's web site to submit patent applications for review.To Patent sign up procedure
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.Peer To Patent first anniversary report, June 2008
Communication: To notify people who sign up on the web site about new applications, summaries are distributed regularly by email. People visiting the web site can easily see the titles of recent applications and other useful information. Productivity: To keep discussion constructive and on topic, each application's site has a facilitator, whose job includes inviting new participants, reminding participants of their goals, and flagging inappropriate postings. Self-regulation: A key contribution by participants is to rate prior art submitted by their fellow participants for a particular application. The ten pieces that receive the highest rating are submitted at the end of the review period to the patent examiner assigned to the patent. This limit prevents the examiner from being overwhelmed by a flood of prior art. Granularity: Peer-to-Patent breaks down the process of volunteering into single questions and tasks, allowing volunteers to more easily choose which roles to occupy and what to contribute. Participants can opt to post comments, submit prior art, evaluate postings, or be active in group discussion.