USPTO Peer Review Process To Begin Soon 116
An anonymous reader writes "As we've discussed several times before on Slashdot, the US patent office is looking to employ a Wiki-like process for reviewing patents. It's nowhere near as open as Wikipedia, but there are still numerous comparisons drawn to the well-known project in this Washington Post story. Patent office officials site the huge workload their case officers must deal with in order to handle the modern cycle of product development. Last year some 332,000 applications were handled by only 4,000 employees. 'The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics. Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome.'"
This is more like Slash-like than wiki-like (Score:2, Informative)
"Anyone who believes he knows of information relating to these proposed patents will be able to post this online and solicit comments from others. But this will suddenly make available reams of information, which could be from suspect sources, and so the program includes a "reputation system" for ranking the material and evaluating the expertise of those submitting it. (...)
Patent examiners, for instance, will award "gold stars" to people who previously submitted the most useful information for judging earlier applications (...) Ultimately, those registered to participate in this online forum will vote on all the nominated information, and the top 10 items will be passed on to the examiner, who will serve as the final arbiter on whether to award a patent. (...)
To assure that the outcome can be trusted, some of those involved in designing the program say some kind of weighted voting system may eventually be required. "If voting is necessary, you'll have to have some rules about who gets to vote,"
How is this not Slash [wikipedia.org], from our truly and good Slashdot? Everything is there, from Score to karma to Mod points. This is far from being wiki, and much more like being slash.
Anyway, what I would like to see is truly peer reviewed patent examination, the kind of review that is done in the scientific community, where the process is publicly disclosed (let's say, in a specialized magazine) and people in the field either submit proof that it is either obvious or has prior art or accepts the patent as valid. Similar to what happens when one claims to have found a proof to some mathematical theorem. Not that I believe that it will happens someday, but a man can dream, can't he?
Re:Why not unemployed, qualified paid volunteers (Score:3, Informative)
Unfortunately, neither you nor the modders understand that the "volunteers" are those having their patents reviewed via internet, not doing the reviews as an institution.
Of course technical experts from those companies as well as anyone else, including any of us on slashdot, can also participate. The article describes the patent office deciding to initially follow a democratic process, allowing one vote per person, but with a slashdot/ebay type modding process to rate the top ten comments on a patent.
Unlike here, that will require RTFA.
rd
Some Numbers (Score:4, Informative)
In actuality, only 332,535 patents were disposed in FY2006, which means the backlog (already in excess of on million patent applications) only grew. In a system where your application is not likely to even be looked at for the first 22 months, and it takes more than 2.5 years for the average application to be processed, they are desperately in need of help examining.
The most depressing part of the report is to look at their goals. The objective is not to reduce the backlog, or improve first action or total pendency time, it is simply to have the backlog increase by less than in previous years. With this kind of thinking, there is no end in sight. What is really needed is a radical change of leadership, such that the resources being allocated and the goals being set can actually improve the situation.