Patent Office unveils Wiki site to help sort claims

With American intelligence agencies taking up the Wiki flag with its new Intellipedia, it should come as no suprise that other government offices are interested in querying the hive mind. The latest to take the plunge is the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which this week announced a plan to use a Wiki-style Web site to permit public (but preferably informed) comments on patent applications. “For the first time in history, it allows the patent-office examiners to open up their cubicles and get access to a whole world of technical experts,” said David J. Kappos of IBM, which helped bring the system to fruition. (IBM, we should note, has received the most patents for each for the past fourteen years.) Experts say the new approach will help overburdened patent examiners more critically examine claims and weed out both junk patents and those that fall under the category of obviousness.

Owing to concerns about protecting proprietary information, patent examiners have until now been discouraged from consulting outside experts. Now, under the new system, companies will have the choice of submitting them to public scrutiny. Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and IBM have all agreed to do so, with approximately 250 patent applications in the software field — an area of heated patent litigation — to come under scrutiny. Of course, the system will only work if it is experts and not cranks doing the judging, and so participants will be ranked according to their level of relevant authority. This should help solve the problem faced recently by the Wikipedia, inwhich one of its most beloved posters was exposed as a twenty-four year old college student and not the professor of divinity as he had claimed. Ultimately, users will vote on the top ten most useful contributions, which will then be transmitted to the patent examiner. He or she will make all final determinations.

-read more in Alan Sipress’s Washington Post report