Posts Tagged: "crowdsourcing"

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will be conducting a roundtable on December 2, 2014 to solicit public opinions concerning the USPTO’s use of crowdsourcing to identify relevant prior art. The roundtable will be held in the Moot Court Room, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, 55 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003. It will begin at 1 pm Eastern Standard Time (EST) and end at 5 pm EST. The meeting will also be accessible via webcast.

Lee will tell Congress that the USPTO is on pace during FY 2014 to receive nearly 600,000 patent applications, which represents an increase of more than 5% as compared to FY 2013. The PTO backlog of unexamined patent applications is less than 620,000 which is down from more than 750,000 in 2009 (a 17.3 percent decrease)… On a cynical note, I will observe that reducing the backlog will become much easier for the USPTO, as will meeting pendency goals, based upon the United States Supreme Court’s breathtaking decision in Alice v. CLS Bank. While not a subject of this hearing, as more and more becomes per se unpatentable as the result of 35 U.S.C. 101, the USPTO should easily be able to meet these goals, particularly in light of the reality that over 50% of patents issued by the USPTO related to software innovations.

Last week the United States Patent and Trademark Office announced that they will be holding a roundtable event on April 10, 2014, to discuss President Obama’s desire to find ways to allow the public to provide the Patent Office with prior art… [T]he real problem facing the Patent Office isn’t just that the industry by and large has completely rejected preissuance submissions, but rather the real problem is why. I have repeatedly heard this: “Why would I want to file prior art to help make the patent stronger?” In fact, at a recent conference I heard one attorney who had filed a preissuance submission explain that a strategic decision was made not to file the best prior art because if the patent examiner issues the patent anyway the client decided they wanted to hold on to the best prior art to challenge the patent later.

Right now the best business to be in at the moment is the patent enforcement business, at least if you are concerning yourself with low-risk monetization with high reward. Between the legacy issue of bad patents, patent auctions and the many who purchase patents, what has started to happen is that the patent system rewards those who have the finances and ability to game the system. But the problem is extraordinarily complex.

Today there is a different solution for those who need to find that particularly illusive non-patent literature that typically makes up the best, most damaging prior art.  Rather than conduct the search around ever corner and under every stone you can leverage the knowledge of a global network of highly educated and highly trained researchers. Essentially, you can tap into their specific knowledge and stores of information by engaging the power of crowdsourced patent searching.

AOP, the world’s largest patent research community, has passed another significant milestone. This time the company has passed the $3 million threshold in financial rewards paid to its global research community. Actually, the milestone was reached at the end of August 2012, but AOP only officially made the announcement last week. In fact, as of the writing of this article the reward calculator found prominently on the AOP homepage shows that some $3,371,500 in reward money has been paid to its community of crowdsourcing researchers.

Article One Partners has just reached the $3 million milestone, having given out over $3 million to its cadre of researchers. Currently the total sum awarded by Article One is at $3,049,000 and counting, with some $64,000 being awarded to the winners of closed Studies on August 24, 2012. Some current Studies now carry a $10,000 Reward compared with the more usual $5,000 Reward.

Article One Partners, or AOP for short, is the world’s largest patent research community. Yesterday the company announced a partnership with Sony Corporation. AOP is supporting Sony’s defense against the rising trend in patent disputes with non-practicing entities (NPEs). “We have chosen to expand our prior art research capabilities with Article One Partners and their global community of researchers,” said Fumihiko Moriya, VP, Sr. General Manager, IP Alliance & Licensing Dept., IP Division, Sony Corporation. “Our partnership with Article One enables Sony to identify highly relevant prior art to help defend against an increasing number of low-quality patent assertions.”

As a result of this announcement today, AOP will help Appsterdam accomplish the organizations mandate of supporting ongoing innovation and business success in the mobile app development community through research projects sent to its global, diverse and highly educated community. The Appsterdam Foundation attorneys and developers will work with AOP to conduct patent research, harnessing the global reach of the AOP community, which has been used by many Fortune 500 companies to locate prior art that can be used against patents asserted against them. While note every search conducted by Article One results in prior art that can be used to invalidate patent claims, many searches have found prior art that is then used in both federal court and at the United States Patent and Trademark Office during reexamination proceedings.

The question may arise – what if the result of crowdsourcing is less than the proverbial “smoking gun,” can it place the App Developers at a disadvantage in court? Case law indicates that the answer is no. Last year, in a patent litigation brought by Personal Audio LLC, the plaintiff attempted to argue that their patent was valid based on crowdsourced research and to seek discovery on this basis. Personal Audio lost on both counts, with federal Judge Miriam Cedarbaum concluding, “eliminating a negative doesn’t show validity” and commenting on the patent owner’s approach with the statement “that’s what I call desperation.” Transcript of Oral Argument and Decision at 12-13 and 14, Personal Audio LLC v. Sirius XM Radio, Inc. et al, No. M8-85 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 2, 2010).

The search for innovative ideas has never been easy, but the advent of crowdsourcing technologies and powerful players willing to embrace new methodologies seems to be paying dividends. Rather than rely on traditional innovation that comes from one individual or a small group of individuals or those working for or with a single entity or as part of a joint venture, crowdsourcing technologies take problems to millions of people and capture the most creative solutions, allowing them to be pursued and developed. “Opening up the conversation and searching for solutions among a broad, but qualified, audience has allowed us to find unique, innovative ideas in a short period of time,” said Matthew Bishop, U.S. business editor and New York bureau chief for The Economist.