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Peer to Patent Program Sees First Submissions


Public review of software patents means stronger patents, faster process, project claims

By Alex Handy
August 17, 2007 — 
For patent seekers, a faster path to approval could prove more rigorous. On June 15, the Peer to Patent Project finally opened its Web site to submissions. The project, designed by the New York Law School's Institute for Information and Policy with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), puts pending computer-related patents out in the open so the public can post links to prior art. Other users can then vote on the validity of the prior art during an 18-week comment period, with the most valid entries being passed to the USPTO with the patent.

These prescrutinized patents will then be fast-tracked through the USPTO, skipping the estimated 40-month waiting period for standard patent approval. Christopher Wong, a student research fellow at the New York Law School and a project manager on the Peer to Patent site, said that many companies are happy to have a faster route to patents, even if the process is more stringent.

“When a company has a patent, they're going to sink a significant amount of resources into it,” Wong said. “Obviously, nobody wants to sink resources into something that could be invalidated in five years. For a company, they don't want to have a bad patent under their belt, because it's actually more of a liability,” he added.

Some of the biggest names in the patent business have already submitted their wares to the Peer to Patent Project. IBM has submitted a patent application for cryptography, Microsoft is awaiting results on one for digital rights management, and GE has already pushed three patent applications into the process. Wong argued that with support from companies such as these, it will be hard to make a case against the validity of the project's purpose: GE and IBM are two of the most prolific patenting companies in the world.

Pilot Program
Wong added that the contentious nature of software patents makes the Peer to Patent Project even more important in the technology world. He hopes that when the project is complete next year, the USPTO will see a permanent place for the effort in its processes. “This is a pilot program for us. The pilot runs for one year or to 250 [patent] applications, whichever comes first. The whole idea is to show that this is valuable,” Wong explained. As of mid-August, the project had garnered its first dozen patents for approval. Those patents are on display for review at dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent.

Although the Peer to Patent Project should speed up the flow of patent approvals, it is still heavily tied to the USPTO's existing processes. Applicants must first submit their patent to the USPTO itself, with specific mention of the desire for submission to the Peer to Patent Project. Wong said that the project simply replaces the USPTO's internal prior-art searches. Since the USPTO's searches are performed exclusively against internal records, the Peer to Patent process is significantly more thorough and timely. After the 18-week public review ends, the USPTO then evaluates the user-submitted prior art, in a fashion similar to how it would consider a patent after its own prior art searches had been completed. Wong said that the Peer to Patent Project specifically targets prior art, as the largest bottleneck in the approval process.

Wong encouraged developers to submit their patent applications to the USPTO with the goal of having them evaluated on the Peer to Patent Project. The more patents submitted, he said, the easier it will be for the project to prove its worth to the USPTO, and to perhaps become permanent.


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