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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually, I don't think we should kill all the patent lawyers. Some of my best friends are patent attorneys -- no, really. But I'd happily stick a knife into the American patent system.

We've been pretty busy with other tasks recently, and now I'm getting concerned about the Peer-to-Patent project participation, because I see some looming deadlines, and I forgot to tell you about them.

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 U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is experimenting with a program that calls on the wisdom of the masses to help patent examiners better review applications. The program, Peer-to-Patent, publishes applications on the Web and asks the public to help determine whether the idea already is in use.