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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

U.S.: Peer to Patent Project Proceeding at Fast Pace.

It is really impressing: The

Peer to Patent project originally pushed by IBM now proceeds at a very fast pace. On October 15, 2006, the opening of a

Developer Mailing List

has been announced. The Community Patent Review project team (NOT to be mixed up with anyting related to the failed European 'Community Patent' approach!) will initiate discussions of technical system architecture in the next couple weeks. Anyone interested in this topic is invited to participate. The focus of the conversation will be technical in nature and will occur on the p2patent-developer mailing list. The initial topic will be establishing a candidate technical architecture that supports the project specification (use cases). On October 20, 2006, there was an

announcement saying that Mr. Beth Noveck, Director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and the Community Patent Review project, indicated that

GE has become the newest lead sponsor of Community Patent Review, an effort to create an on-line system to connect experts to patent examiners.

Mr. Q. Todd Dickinson, GE's Vice President and Chief Intellectual Property Counsel and the former Under Secretary for Intellectual Property and Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), will serve on the project's Steering Committee. And, on October 24, 2006, the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School has

announced that companies holding more than 6% of the total number of this year's U.S. patents will submit their patent applications for "open peer review" under the pilot project at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). GE, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Red Hat, the Lead Sponsors of the "Community Patent Review" initiative, will allow some of their patent applications to be reviewed by the public and consent to have public commentary submitted directly to the USPTO for official consideration. The pilot will launch in early 2007 and focus on published but not-yet-granted patent applications relating to computer software.

Whatever the final success or failure of this project will be, it is an utmost interesting experiment. And we patent people here in Europe, what do we do? Did anybody really took notice? Is there any discussion of these ideas ongoing within European Chapters of

FICPI, or within

epi,

CIPA, or

Patentanwaltskammer?

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