The following is excerpted from a press release issued today, November 17, 2008, by Article One Partners:
Today, Article One Partners, LLC launched as a new global community to legitimize the validity of patents. Community members – who Article One calls Advisors – have an opportunity to send in previously hard to find evidence of validity for high profile patents. By tapping the unique knowledge and referral networks of our Advisors, this publicly available evidence known as prior art can be discovered. Article One analyzes the prior art to determine whether it can show patents to be legitimized or invalid. If Article One forms an opinion that patents are invalid, Advisors earn up to U.S. $50,000, with $1,000,000 total being offered for launch. Advisors who actively build the community also earn premium compensation in Article One’s Profit Sharing Plan of about five percent (5%) of the company’s net annual profit. The result is a highly-rewarded community providing a citizen’s review of U.S. patents to justify monopoly pricing for true innovation and energize U.S. patent reform.
Article One also directly supports other reform efforts, including early review of pending applications submitted to the U.S. Patent Office. Article One joins the U.S. Patent Office and Congress in endorsing the important work of peertopatent.org, which requests from the public prior art to forward to the Patent Office for consideration in granting new patents. Acknowledging this critical work, Article One encourages Advisors to participate in public-sector reform, offering Profit Sharing on articleonepartners.com when Advisors provide prior art that is accepted by peertopatent.org for submission to the Patent Office.
Earn Compensation for the Value of your Knowledge
- WHO CAN JOIN – All types of people with an interest in science or technology can participate if legally eligible. Members can join from anywhere in the world and from every type of industry and specialty: Engineers; Hobbyists; Academics; Scientists; Students; Professionals; Retirees; Experts and more.
- WHAT TO LOOK FOR – Advisors have an opportunity to review Patent Studies posted on articleonepartners.com, and to submit relevant prior art (evidence of publicly available information predating a patent’s invention, which teaches or renders obvious the patent claims).
- WHERE PRIOR ART IS FOUND – Prior art knowledge and evidence may come from published content anywhere in the world and in any language. This includes: previous patents; news or academic publications; non-digitized documents such as textbooks; or any public document provided to others, including conference or academic papers and business materials. Prior art is often found in documents tucked away in a file cabinet years ago, or in the back corner of a library.
Download the full press release [Download 11_17_08_aop_launch_final_wire.doc].
The business model of this company aims to suck money from large companies that are the target of patent litigation. I think this "reward" incentive to challenge patents based on "prior art" should be extended to "subject matter" criterias (such as business method patents or software patents), as well as to any kind of patent, where the patent applicant could face a charge if someone finds it invalid. That would shift the burden from the "burden the society with false claims" to the "applicant".
The only way to achieve a high quality patent system is to burden the applicant, and suck the money from there, not from targeted companies.
Posted by: zoobab | November 17, 2008 at 05:34 AM
As a response to zoobab: The patent system has been bursting at the seams for some time now and the number of overly broad or unoriginal patents that fell through the cracks is high. I feel that articleonepartners.com's approach could help get those unjust patent monopolies in check and promote worthy patents at the same time.
Any opinions?
Posted by: Katja Bartholmess | November 17, 2008 at 04:19 PM