Patent Law

Fattening Peer

By Gary Odom and Jordan Kuhn

The USPTO is extending and expanding its Peer Review pilot program. While the original pilot was limited to "computer-related arts," the program is porking to eat business method applications too. 400 possible published applications will sweat it out under public grilling, up from the original 250. The pilot is extended for another year; now scheduled to end June 15, 2009.

From the USPTO announcement:

To date, companies participating in the Peer Review Pilot have included IBM, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Intel, GE, Red Hat, Cisco, Yahoo!, and others. With the expansion of the pilot, Goldman Sachs has volunteered to join as a participant.

"We support the Peer Review Pilot and commend the USPTO's decision to expand the program to include financial sector innovation, which has been one of the most difficult areas to locate relevant prior art." remarked John Squires, chief intellectual property counsel at Goldman Sachs. "Expansion of the pilot into class 705 will allow the Office to access considerable industry expertise and holds promise for improving patent quality and the shortening of long pendency times."

So far, the pilot's first 31 applications have been examined. More than half of the examiners who examined an application in the Peer Review Pilot so far thought the prior art submitted by the peers was helpful during examination. More than one-third of the examiners used peer-supplied prior art in the first action on the merits. Nearly 75 percent of the participating examiners said they believed the program would be useful if it were incorporated into regular Office practice.

For this pilot, applications are assigned to an examiner for examination as soon as a submission is received from the peertopatent.org Web site. This shortens considerably the time it normally takes from filing an application to a first action on the merits in the areas where the pilot is occurring.

Full post as published by The Patent Prospector on July 16, 2008 (boomark / email).