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My office made the front page of The Washington Post today, with an announcement of a new pilot program that will allow the public to comment on the merits of pending patent applications. A number of companies have volunteered to allow their applications to enter the pilot program that will allow internet users to review the application contents and provide prior art documentation and comments that are intended to help the examiners make better evaluations of the merits of the application. Recognizing that the system will likely be the target of people trying to game the system, it will include a voting system to attempt to identify the most relevant comments, which will then be provided to the examiner for consideration.
I'm curious to to see how this program will work out. If well implemented, with good controls to minimize the gaming of the system, it could be a really useful tool that will provide the examiners with the most relevant (and often obscure) documentation into the hands of the examiner. This in turn should improve the quality of the decision making in the examination process and increase the quality of the resulting patents. However, a poor implementation could simply bury the examiner in additional useless documentation that only wastes what limited time is available to evaluate these applications.
Of course, the only way to evaluate the merits of this pilot program is if people actually use it. The news article doesn't provide any details about when or where the applications will be available, but I suspect that an announcement will be posted on the US Patent and Trademark Office website when the pilot is officially launched.
I'm curious to to see how this program will work out. If well implemented, with good controls to minimize the gaming of the system, it could be a really useful tool that will provide the examiners with the most relevant (and often obscure) documentation into the hands of the examiner. This in turn should improve the quality of the decision making in the examination process and increase the quality of the resulting patents. However, a poor implementation could simply bury the examiner in additional useless documentation that only wastes what limited time is available to evaluate these applications.
Of course, the only way to evaluate the merits of this pilot program is if people actually use it. The news article doesn't provide any details about when or where the applications will be available, but I suspect that an announcement will be posted on the US Patent and Trademark Office website when the pilot is officially launched.
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