Sunday, December 2, 2012

Crowdsourcing and Patents

Crowdsourcing and Patents

In my blog post last week, I discussed patent trolls, or more formally known as non-practicing entities. Patent trolls are companies that make money solely on licensing and litigation from patents; they often buy these patents from other individuals or companies and usually are not even involved in creating it. The dramatic increase of patent troll companies over the past five years has resulted in an increased number of patent cases making it to the court. Many innovators, consumers, and other companies have long seen patent trolls as companies who's practices are unfair. Despite supporters who argue that patent trolling is no more unfair than investing it favorable stocks, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has launched its own attempt at slowing these companies down.

Recently, the USPTO worked with a crowdsourcing Q&A company called Stack Exchange to launch a website called AskPatents.com. The website aims to act "by introducing third party input into the examination process," particularly focusing on a factor known as prior art. Prior art is one of the most important aspects to examine to verify a patent's legitimacy. Prior art, essentially, is "any publicly available evidence that the idea for an invention is not new, and/or is completely obvious." Prior art can be represented in many ways, including "earlier patents, scientific research papers, newspaper articles, webpages, textbooks, or any other publication or available example of an idea." To better assess the subjectivity of declaring something obvious the USPTO says that a patent claim is invalid if it's obvious to a "person having ordinary skill in the art." So how does crowdsourcing come in to play?

Finding prior art is a difficult and time consuming tasks. To make it even harder, patent application examiners are only allowed 22.5 hour per application to discover prior art. By crowdsourcing, people can help the USPTO find prior art faster and more extensively. The system has proved to work since day one. On September 20th, 2012, the day Ask Patents launched, a user posted a thread regarding a newly released Microsoft patent application for the "functionality of smacking a phone to silence it." Within just six hours, another user was able to find evidence of prior art that was "exactly what Microsoft [was] trying to patent, and pre-[dated] Microsoft's filling by two years." The patent was immediately invalidated.

I, and certainly many others, can agree that the patent system as a whole needs reform. Its original design and system is no longer suitable for the growing commercial marketplace we have. There are too many loopholes and ways for companies, like patent trolls, to take unfair advantage of the system, ultimately benefiting no one but themselves. I personally believe that opening the examination process to the public and crowdsourcing is an great step in the right direction. Crowdsourcing has proven to be very successful in many other fields and industries and I think that it would be excellent candidate for improving the patent system. People will be motivated to help examine patents because they are the ones who see the unfairness and are affected by unjust patents.

This blog post concludes the postings for this blog. Thank you to all those who have read and/or commented on this blog.

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1 comment:

  1. It has been great reading your thoughts on patents over the past quarter. I never knew about the recent crowdsourcing efforts -- it seems like a great idea! I hope that you continue your explorations in the future.

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