Peer-to-patent launched in Australia
An Australian version of the Peer-to-Patent initiative was recently launched in conjunction with IP Australia (official site). From the official announcement:
Peer-to-Patent Australia opens part of the patent examination process and invites the public to review patent applications volunteered for the trial… The process is designed to tap into the expertise of the public to help assess whether a particular application is eligible for a patent.
The system is currently being run as a 12 month pilot programme, limited to business method patent applications.
The original Peer-to-Patent initiative completed a 2 year US pilot in June 2009. While the US Patent Office has yet to report on its results, the first year report from the New York Law School was positive (some criticisms are listed at Wikipedia). The US pilot was not limited to business method patents, although interestingly the patent application which received the most user interaction was such a patent – “Method, apparatus and computer program product for providing status of a process” (hmm, maybe they could also give it a unique name like ps or top?).
It is a good idea for the Australian pilot to be limited to business method patents, which covers most manifestations of software patents. It appears that IP Australia is giving good support to it. Let’s hope that IPONZ watches this closely – IPONZ (like the MED) has good IT systems and has been quite progressive with IT. If the pilot works, it will be a major improvement to a currently in-need-of-improvement system.
Of course, as with any community-driven system, its quality will only be as good as the community supports it. For open source, could it be a case of “many eyes make bad software patent applications unsuccessful”?
