A New Peer Group
The United Kingdom joins the handful of countries that have decided to seek the public’s
help in improving the quality of issued patents.

BY PHILIPPA MAISTER

The United Kingdom is the latest country to invite citizens to help government patent examiners do their job. In launching its version of a “ peer-to-patent” program, the U.K. joins the United States, where the method was pioneered, Australia, Japan, and South Korea.

Unlike Article One Partners, a New York–based company that crowdsources the search for prior art and pays up to $50,000 per patent to those who turn up something significant [see “Crowd Pleaser, page 22], the U.K.’s Intellectual Property Office and its counterparts in other countries rely on volunteers to study patent applications that have yet to be granted.

“We had been watching what the U.S.
had done for some time, and we were in-
trigued by the results,” says Nigel Hanley,
a senior IPO examiner who leads the U.K.
project. While third parties have always
been free to comment on patent applica-
tions in the U.K., Hanley says the new
peer-to-patent program aims to bring state-
of-the-art technology into the process.

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by New York Law School professor Beth Noveck as a way of boosting the quality of issued patents. With foundation support, and financial backing from International Business Machines Corporation and other companies, the Patent and Trademark Office agreed to test the concept. The program’s backbone is its Web site, peertopatent.org, which is maintained by New York Law School’s Center for Patent Innovations. Volunteer reviewers register on the site to select patents in categories of interest, adding annotations or comments as desired. After 90 days, the center submits a report with up to six annotated prior art references to the PTO. Participants benefit because the PTO gives their applications priority for a “first office action,” shaving up to 18 months off the approval process, says former Red Hat, Inc., general counsel Mark Webbink., who leads the center.

Jack Harvey, the PTO executive who oversees the program, says examiners find the peer reviewers’ information helpful. And, Harvey says, the program has added little cost or administrative burden for the PTO. As for results, the first U.S. pilot, which launched in 2007 and ran through 2008, covered 250 applications involving computer technologies and business methods. More than 600 items of prior art were submitted for 189 applications, with more than 2,700 peer reviewers signing up, the PTO reports. Examiners used prior art provided in 20 percent of the applications reviewed. “At a minimum,” PTO director David Kappos said in March 2010, “the peer-to-patent pilot presented interesting and tantalizing results.” So tantalizing that the PTO launched a new one-year pilot last October using 1,000 applications from such fields as biotechnology, telecommunications, and speech recognition. The goal: see if the peer-to-patent concept can be expanded.