WIKIS AND COMMUNITY PATENTS


CNet reports on Wikipatents.com, a newly set-up website allowing the public to rewrite a patent's description in laypersons' terms, rate the technical accuracy of a patent, vote on a reasonable royalty value, and divulge information about its availability for licensing. Thus far the site is limited to patents that have already been granted. Members of the public can also make a note of prior art that they feel to be relevant to the patent in question. The site comes at a time when the USPTO has highlighted its intention to establish a peer review mechanism for patents.


The IPKat says that at the end of the day, the contents of the patents in question are public information and so free for public comment. However, this is no substitute for proper examination and, as with all Wikis, it is open to inaccurate or biased treatment by (often well-meaning) members of the public.

The good news is that the Community Patent finally has a launch date – Jaunary 2007! The (sort of) bad news is the Community Patent in question is the New York Law School’s Community Patent Review, which (according to its website) ‘seeks to create a peer review system for patents that exploits network technology to enable innovation experts to inform the patent examination procedure.’
WIKIS AND COMMUNITY PATENTS WIKIS AND COMMUNITY PATENTS Reviewed by Anonymous on Tuesday, August 29, 2006 Rating: 5

1 comment:

  1. You might want to see the comments on "peer to patent" on IPBiz.blogspot.com.

    Also, the recent confusion about how the recent ACT work in stem cells was going to invalidate the 1990's patents of Thomson / WARF is an indicator of how untrained and unfamiliar the general population is to the concept of PRIOR ART.

    ReplyDelete

All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.

It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.

Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html

Powered by Blogger.