Gowers Report Recommends CPR

Report to Britain’s Chief Financial Minister Recommends Piloting NYLS’s Community Patent Review in the UK

In a report released December 6, 2006 to the United Kingdom’s top financial ministers, former Financial Times editor Andrew Gowers recommends that the Community Patent Review process developed be piloted in the UK. Gowers was commissioned by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer to conduct an independent review of the UK’s intellectual property framework in December 2005. His final report, Gowers Review of Intellectual Property http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/53F/C8/pbr06_gowers_report_755.pdf , examines all components of the intellectual property system and provides targeted recommendations for reforms fitting for today’s digital age.

Among his recommendations (see #23), Gowers specifically highlights the Community Patent Review project developed by New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law and Policy. He asserts that Community Patent Review could significantly improve the quality of patents granted and calls for a pilot to be conducted in the UK in 2007.

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network, Community Patent Review 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 seeks to design and pilot an online system for open review of patent applications that will allow experts from the scientific community to submit “prior art” – information relevant to assessing if an invention is patentable – with commentary to the patent examiner. The USPTO will pilot this new examination system in spring 2007. Computer Associates, GE, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat have already agreed to submit some of their patents for public review. 

For more information about the Community Patent Review, please visit http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent.
Click here for a project summary http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent/p2p_exec_sum_sep_06.pdf and here http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v20/20HarvJLTech123.pdf to read about the project in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.