How Peer To Patent Works Better With IP.com
Peer To Patent and IP.com have announced a new technology partnership by which Peer To Patent peer reviewers will be provided direct access to many of IP.com’s valuable prior art databases by logging in here with their Peer to Patent project credentials.
Peer To Patent opens the patent examination process to public participation to accelerate the process and improve the quality of patents. Inventors participating in the pilot agree to have their patent applications reviewed by volunteer scientific and technical experts. These peer reviewers discuss the applications and submit prior art they think might be relevant to determining if an invention is new and non-obvious, as the law requires. After the review period, the prior art is sent to the USPTO patent examiners for their consideration during examination.
Commenting on the new partnership of IP.com with Peer To Patent, Manny W. Schecter, Chief Patent Counsel at IBM Corporation, said, “The ability of the public to identify prior art relevant to published patent applications is enhanced by free access to potential prior art repositories, such as those provided by IP.com.”
In a recent interview with Gene Quinn at IP Watchdog, Manny Schecter commented further on Peer To Patent, referencing the importance of “non-patent literature” as prior art:
QUINN: Well, let me ask you about Peer-to-Patent, because I know you’re involved in that. I don’t exactly know how much you are involved in that, but that also seems like a particularly exciting avenue as well. At least the way it seems to be being handled. I had questions about it initially, but it seems to be turning into something that could be quite useful.
SCHECTER: Yeah, I am very involved in Peer-to-Patent. I serve on the steering committee and I was involved at the earliest stages of helping to get the project going. It is going rather well. I think at times people have lost sight of the project because it has drifted in and out of public awareness or public consciousness, at least in the patent world. But the project ran a series of early pilots in four different countries including the U.S., which was the first pilot, but also including Australia, Japan, and Korea. And each and every one of those pilots reached the same conclusion which is confirmation that the public has the ability, given the tools to access prior art and collaborate, to find prior art that can be helpful to patent examiners in performing patent examination. And so now what’s happened is we’ve moved to a second stage of pilots, in which the U.S. is again on the leading edge, but some other countries are on the verge of following. And in which some small adjustments have been made to the parameters of the system to see if it can be improved. And in which we’ve changed the focus from validating the concept to testing scalability.
Along the way I should point out, Gene, one other thing, which is we had a particularly successful rate of citation of non patent prior art in the United States during the pilot. And that’s I think really significant. For one, many of us have long wondered why patent examiners don’t more frequently cite non patent prior art. And here we actually received an acknowledgment by the USPTO that the rate of relevant non patent prior art citation by the public was significantly higher than that of their own examiners. Meaning that maybe the USPTO itself needs to question whether they can do a better job of finding non patent prior art when they do their own searching.
That’s where we think access to IP.com’s growing collection searchable of non-patent literature makes the Peer To Patent project that much better.
“We are pleased that we can facilitate patent search and examination, and contribute to Peer To Patent’s critical mission to leverage the world’s talent in order to produce better patents,” said Thomas J. Colson, President and CEO of IP.com.
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Tagged IBM, non-patent literature, Peer To Patent, Prior Art Database, prior art search, USPTO
Wordlab | Blog | Peer to Patent and IP.comMay 5, 2011 at 11:36 am
[...] is already the best place to do free online patent and non-patent literature searching, and now IP.com has entered a partnership with Peer To Patent, in which “Peer To Patent peer reviewers will be provided direct access to many of IP.com’s [...]