Advisory Board for Community Patent Review Announced

New York, November 28, 2006 – The Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School (http://dotank.nyls.edu) announces the formation of an Advisory Board for the Community Patent Review Project.  The Advisory Board will exercise external oversight over the project.  The aim of the Advisory Board is to ensure a transparent and open process for the development of the technology and the open review process and to ensure that decisions regarding the administration of the pilot are taken in a fair and transparent manner.  Advisory Board members are:

Tilo Bachmann
Administrator, European Patent Office

Robert Barr
Executive Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Berkeley Law School
Former Vice President for Intellectual Property and Worldwide Patent Counsel, Cisco

John Bracken
Program Officer, MacArthur Foundation

Dennis Crouch
Patently-O
Visiting Assistant, Professor Boston University Law School
Associate, McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP

Sean Dennehy
Director of Patents
UK Patent Office

John Duffy
Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School

Will Fitzpatrick
Corporate Counsel, Omidyar Network

Alan Kasper
Vice President of the Board of Directors, American Intellectual Property Law Association
Partner, Sughrue Mion, PLLC

Stephen Kunin
Special Counsel, Oblon Spivak
Former Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy, USPTO

Mark Lemley
Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology
William H. Neukom Professor of Law, Stanford Law School

Stephen Merrill
National Academies

Mike Messinger
Director, Sterne, Kessler Goldstein, & Fox P.L.L.C.

Marcus Mueller
European Patent Office, EPO Scenarios for the Future Project

Gideon Parchomovsky
Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Arti Rai
Professor of Law, Duke University Law School

Steven Weiner
Partner, Davis Polk & Wardwell

Terry Winograd
Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University

Advisory Board member profiles are available on the Community Patent Review website at http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/advisory.html.

Community Patent Review is run by a Project Team from New York Law School working with an Executive Team from the USPTO and overseen by the Steering Committee and the Advisory Board. In addition all project documents are posted to the web for public input. Current Steering Committee members are: Adam Avrunin, Red Hat, Todd Dickinson, GE (former Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director, USPTO), Kaz Kazenske, Microsoft (former Deputy Commissioner, USPTO), Curt Rose, HP, Jim Saliba, VP Intellectual Property and Standards and Steve Klocinski, Assistant General Counsel, Computer Associates and Manny Schecter, IBM.

About Community Patent Review

The Community Patent Review project is an initiative of the New York Law School Institute for Information Law & Policy in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Community Patent Review aims to improve the quality of issued patents by giving the patent examiner access to better information by means of an open network for community peer review of patent applications. With the sponsorship and support of the MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, Computer Associates, GE, HP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Red Hat, Community Patent Review (also known as "Peer to Patent" or "Open Patent Review") will create a web-based system that exploits network technology to connect innovation experts to patent examiners and the patent examination process. The USPTO will pilot this open review system for patent examination on 250-400 software-related patents in Spring 2007. This is the first social software project that will directly impact legal decision-making. http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent

http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/Advisory_Board_Release_11_28_06.pdf

Comments

[Chellapilla Kameswara Rao]

Community Patent Review is a very good concept. Definitely this gives an excellant oppurtunity for public, freelance experts to contribute their search expertise in digging out the prior art IP and non-IP literature related to patent document under opposition and review. I wish good luck to USPTO in this ad-venture.