Boing Boing: Patent office will ask the public to “peer review” inventions
> The US Patent and Trademark Office has launched “Peer to Patent,” a community patent peer review project. The USPTO is overloaded with patent filings, so it does little or no investigation into patnets before rubber-stamping them, expecting that the courts will sort out who invented what. This changes the patent system from something that promotes invention to something that rewards companies who aggressively sue inventors.
> Peer to Patent aims to address this by encouraging the public to review patents, to determine whether they are valid based on the at-large expert knowledge about what has already been invented and what is a new, useful, nonobvious invention. IBM has agreed to have its patents vetted by the public as a guinea pig in the project.
About time, as the US patent office has been struggling for ages now. If you read Slashdot, you see loads of posts about outrageous patent claims with easy to find prior art. May 12th will shed some more light on this possible solution.
