The problem: an epidemic of shoddy patents. The solution: Wikipedia?
That's the basic concept behind a pilot program sponsored by IBM and other companies, which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office appears poised to green-light. The project would apply an advisory version of the wiki approach to the patent-approval process.
The issue is that patent applications have tripled in the past two decades, leaving examiners only 20 hours on average to comb through a complex application, research past inventions, and decide whether a patent should be granted. As a result, critics contend, quality has declined and lucrative patents have been granted for ideas that weren’t actually new.
One solution is to let astute outsiders weigh in during the patent-review process, as online encyclopedia Wikipedia does, vastly increasing the information available to the patent examiner.
New York Law School professor Beth Noveck floated the idea on her blog last July [2005], inspiring an article in Wired News. That, in turn, attracted the attention of IBM, which got behind the idea.
Says Dave Kappos, vice president for intellectual-property law at IBM: "It’s a very powerful concept because it leverages the enormous capabilities of the entire world of technical talent."...
Corporate sponsors including IBM, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard will make a total of 250 to 400 software patents available for the pilot....
Comment. Brilliant and much-needed, along with a simplified procedure to nullify patents awarded in error. I love the way this project moved from a blog posting to a trial run by the patent office and major corporations in about a year.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/22/2006 01:45:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
