A Wiki for Patents

September 13, 2006 by  

Talk about change!  Here’s a model for knowledge sharing that would’ve been hard to imagine in the not so distant past.

A Wiki for Patents: "

web20.jpgCourtesy of IP Law Daily comes news of a new wiki, WikiPatents.  This cool idea evolved from struggles that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has experienced in efficiently processing patent applications.  According to the site’s FAQs

WikiPatents is intended to be the crossroads at which inventors, engineers, scientists, patent owners, competitors, litigants, the open source community, IP attorneys, patent Examiners, and other concerned members of the patent community openly share relevant and valuable information about specific patents and patent applications.

The forum, open to the public under certain guidelines, including user votes on the quality of the various wiki submission, is designed to be particularly helpful to the open source and software development communities, two areas where overburdened patent examiners are particularly taxed.  The USPTO is often at a loss in judging when ‘prior art’ exists in the software field.

Prior art  are creations or previous advances that are used to develop new goods, services and production processes.  In the tech arena, software specifically, it’s hard to tell when prior art is simply relabeled and presented as something entirely new.  Patents Wiki could be a big step in giving the USPTO million of expert advisers in calling the shots on patent applications.

(Via IP Democracy.)

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