New Innovations at the US Patent and Trade Office
In 2004, Pete Ashdown invited Utah voters to use a Wiki to collaborate on his policy proposals as part of his bid to unseat Senator Orren Hatch (R-UT). In 2006, Green Media Toolshed launched MediaVolunteer.org to enable tens of thousands of volunteers to collaborate in order to build a comprehensive media contact database. And now, in March 2007, the US Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) is launching its own Wiki to allow the public to do research on patents pending.
Exploiting perhaps the most innovative use of the internet, the USPTO has turned to the wizened crowd and asked them not only to review patent applications, but also to rank their fellow reviewers, helping to lift the best of the comments to the top of the list. And while opening the floodgates to technical experts outside the USPTO is great for expanding the technical knowledge base of the USPTO, the program will also tap into the general population who may know of prior uses of proposed patents.
And prior use is extremely important. Take this example: way back in the ancient history of the internet, 1994, the USPTO awarded Compton’s New Media the patent for multimedia. Fortunately, the industry roared back arguing that the notion of multimedia, as defined in the patent was so broad as to cover applications that had been around at least a year prior to the application.
In that case, an attentive industry effectively forced the USPTO to recall the patent, though it still remains pending. Should it ever be re-awarded, it would retroactively make all multimedia technologies in violation of the patent. Not a very good thing, at all. Opening the patent review process to public scrutiny improves our ability to prevent the awarding of such wrong-headed patents in the first place.
Back in 1995, I had the opportunity to talk with then head of the USPTO, Bruce Lehman. When I raised this question about the multimedia patent to him, he responded saying that technology people could learn a lot from lawyers. Lehman was a lawyer and so were the USPTO staff that awarded the patent to Compton’s
Today, happily, we see that the lawyers of the USPTO have learned something valuable from technology people.