The US Patent and Trade Office will be opening patent applications up to user review on the web, reports the Washington Post. Although only pilot project, the move towards openness raises some interesting questions, and even hopes, about the direction of IP law.
The project will allow users to access and comment on patent applications, offering information on prior art, utility, and the other previously mentioned criteria of patent review. Users will also be able to rank previous comments, thereby pushing the most highly regarded comments to the eyes of the agency's official reviewers. Importantly, the article also indicates that identifiability and transparency of user's and their behavior will be implemented. If done correctly, the USPO peer review process could mirror the success of services like Digg.com and eBay, both of whom have thrived under a user-review centric model.
The new approach is reported to launch in "the spring", and has not yet seen the light of day. It may be a lot of PR hot air, and emerge as a crippled project or not at all. However, the approach seems solid, reasonable and viable. For one, the launch will cover only software design patents, a field amiable to the more committed denizens of the web, and one in which the online review process should prove useful rather than merely novel. If the new review process is demonstrated to be more useful than the previous for software design applications, than the process may be expanded to broader fields and even become the dominant way of doing things.
At the least, the USPTO's experiment in peer review represents a new flexibility in the culture of a major institution of IP culture. At best, the shift represents a way in which the open and democratic impulses of mature web culture are bleeding into larger society. A re-emphasis of the commons is central to web culture, and so if its salience and impact is rising in this way, it may speak well for a corresponding re-emphasis on the commons in IP law.
