StackExchange, Google Team Up With USPTO To Help Crowdsource Prior Art Discovery

from the this-is-a-good-thing dept

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

I've been a big fan of StackExchange , for a while, as a very cool platform for getting expert insight into a variety of (mostly, but not entirely, technical) questions. The platform is so useful that, last week, Google even announced that it was pushing its own YouTube API developer support effortsof its own Google Groups platform and over to Stack Overflow (the original StackExchange site). But that appears to be just one area in which the two companies are collaborating. As they announced today , StackExchange and Google are working together on AskPatents.com , a site dedicated to better crowdsourcing prior art.And it's not just StackExchange and Google working together: they've teamed up with the USPTO to make it easier for good prior art to be submitted to the USPTO to (hopefully) invalidate bad patents. While we were incredibly underwhelmed by the America Invents Act, which was last year's attempt at patent reform, it has (finally) made it much easier to allow third parties to submit prior art which may be helpful to examiners during the ~18 hours they spend in reviewing each patent. There was the famed Peer-to-Patent program, which I was quite skeptical about , but this seems to take that to another level, thanks in part to the useful setup of StackExchange's system that helps float good ideas to the top.But where this gets much more powerful is through integration in two key spots. First up, this will be. Recently, Google launched its prior art finder , which tried to help people find prior art through automated searches -- but you can nowclick through directly to the AskPatents site by clicking a "discuss" button that will be shown on each patent page, which will take you straight to the StackExchange page. Neat. The second integration may be even more powerful. As people find useful prior art and it bubbles to the top, StackExchange's system will make it easy to then directly submit it to the USPTO. Clicking a button will take you to an already filled out USPTO form, where a bit of additional info can be added and submitted.StackExchange founder Joel Spolsky sees this as an opportunity to help stamp out bad patents: "Collectively, we’re building a crowd-sourced worldwide detective agency to track down and obliterate bogus applications. Over time, we hope that the Patent Stack Exchange will mitigate the problems caused by rampant patent trolling. It’s not a complete fix, but it’s a good start."There are still tremendous structural problems with the patent system. And,, a system like this just helps to prevent some of the bigger mistakes, rather than attacking any of the fundamental problems. But, given just how damaging absolutely ridiculous patents are these days, anything that helps stop bad patents has to be seen as a good thing.

Filed Under: crowdsourcing, patents, prior art, uspto

Companies: google, stackexchange