Peer-to-Patent project
The Peer-to-Patent project launched two months ago to very little fan fare – at least very little fan fare for such a big step.
So what is the Peer-to-Patent project? The New York Law School launched the Peer-to-Patent project as a year long trial project endorsed by the US Patent and Trademark Office. Peer-to-Patent lets the community review current patent applications and submit potential prior art. Anybody can sign up and participate in the discussions, submit potential prior art or just follow the discussion. Right now the patents up for review have been submitted voluntarily by their others. (In addition to sponsoring the project, they are also hoping to get the patents approved faster than the typical four year process.)
Right on the Peer-to-Patent home page you can quickly find out what's happening. They have 1347 community members, 176 comments and 56 uploads of potential prior art. Pretty impressive! These are people that are volunteering their time and effort to make sure that any new software patents that come out of this process are valid. Faster, more valid, publicly discussed and understood software patents will eventually lead to less litigation and less fear of the unknown lawsuit.
And then there's a few people that advocate NOT helping because it might help the patent trolls. I think there are better ways to target the bad guys. Not participating in Peer-to-Patent because you were afraid the bad guys might learn too much would be kind of like prohibiting blogging technologies because terrorists can blog too. More, open information along with good policies is the key!
There also appears to be a very large SecondLife following around the Peer-to-Patent project. The project bought Democracy Island and holds regular discussions there. I'll let someone else blog about that though since I'm still resisting spending significant time in Second Life. (I'd have to give up something else to find the time …)
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