While I'm certainly a big fan of involving more people in the process of reviewing patents, I've been a huge skeptic of the "Peer-to-Patent" program that the USPTO tested over the past few years. As I noted earlier, there's very little incentive for most people to actually get involved in peer reviewing a patent that early on.

On June 15, the New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, in cooperation with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), launched the Peer-to-Patent community patent review pilot program.

Heads up! Some new patent applications have just been posted on the Peer to Patent Project website, including one from Microsoft, its first entry in the project, on a kind of system I think of as a DRM'd computerized bean counter which tracks all the media clips bought and sold in the offline system of the invention, and then pays copyright holders and their ex-filesharing pirate distributors.

While it would appear that all parties concerned with innovation would benefit from and cheer on the Peer-to-Patent Project, that’s not the case. Linux World has an interesting note from a fellow who realized that a peer-review examination process that does not kill a patent makes it stronger.

RMS: « It is very important to promote peer-to-peer methods of doing various collaborative tasks, because servers cause issues of control vs freedom, and peer-to-peer is the only way to avoid them. »

"...peer production is about the social production of value, directly through social relations [...] For peer to peer self aggregation to occur, we need distributed infrastructures [...] Peer to peer is about non-rival goods that can be reproduced at marginal cost and abundantly.

I'm very happy to tell you that it's just been announced that the Peer-to-Patent project, which is a cooperative project between New York Law School and the USPTO, has been extended after the first year's trial. It's also been expanded to include business methods patents! Yum. I can't wait to see you try to invalidate some of those.

The Peer-To-Patent Project is a new initiative by New York Law School's Do Tank in cooperation with the U.S. Patent Office to use open source and open knowledge techniques to help stop the deluge of bad software patents in America.

The first patent applications we are invited to try to disqualify by looking for prior art have been posted on the Peer to Patent Project website. This is the project working to provide the USPTO with information about prior art during the application process. It's an experiment, and it's historic. It's never been tried before, to let the public provide input into the application process.