Community Patent Presentation at USPTO

At the USPTO Open Source Software Meeting on Feb 16, Marc Ehrlich (IBM) and Beth Noveck (New York Law) presented the Community Patent initiative.  Marc's presentation  focused on presenting a hypothetcal model for an end to end community patent review system.  Beth's talk presented  the ideas underlying community patenting and discussed next steps for the initiative.

Comments

[Urban Terrorist]

I've read several summaries of the meeting, and see a couple of issues:

1) Any Peer review process cannot be limited to one area (i.e. software patents), it has to be universal, if not it will be open to legal challenge.

2) While many in the software community will welcome a peer review process, I suspect there will be considerable opposition in pharmaceuticals.

3) The "Perjury" card should be played. Hard. When we have a "3 Strikes" law that means jail for life in cases of theft, we should consider a "3 Strikes" law also for patent filers. Indeed it can be argued that fake patents cost far more than petty theft. Consider a set of rules that state:

First Strike - your applications automatically are graded one grade lower.

Second Strike - your applications are automatically graded 3 grades lower.

Third Strike - you aren't allowed to file any patent applications for 25 years.

Perjury in patent filings should be a big issue, and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

No in regards to peer review, I've been reviewing a lot of patents in my area of expertise, and the vast majority of them aren't novel, and/or are trivial.

Consider the NO2 (Nitrogen Dioxide) conversion patent that Johnson Matthey owns - there were articles written about this sort of conversion 10 years before they filed the patent. Now this particular patent isn't worth fighting, it expires in 2007 anyway, but it serves as a good example.