Strategy Session

Last month I wrote about the pilot project the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office began on June 15 for open reviews of software patents, called the Peer Review Pilot.

The pilot is a joint initiative with the Community Patent Review Project (CPRP), organized by the New York Law School's Institute for Information and Policy. It will run for one year and patent holders agree to share their applications.

Let’s alter that concept a little bit and let people comment on all public patents and pending patent applications. Enter WikiPatents, a site launched six months ago by Peter Johnson and Kevin Hermansen.

“We’re focused on pending patent applications,” Johnson explains. “We’re basically taking what’s already public and we’re making them all available to the public. We’re catering to owners, inventors, potential investors, competitors, litigators—anyone who has any interest in the patent is welcome to comment on and review the patents.”

Users have free access to more than 3 million patents on WikiPatents. The site offers free patent PDF downloads, file histories, and patent searching. The site links users to the patent’s file history at the U.S. Patent Office, where you can view the drawings and learn who currently owns the patent, for example.

Johnson says that the idea for the site stemmed from what they view as the general vagueness that exists around patents. “There’s a lot of uncertainty around patents and what they mean to people and the market. That uncertainty is causing a huge amount of burden right now; it can cost someone millions to defend a patent. If the patent’s owner and the potential infringer and potential investor all better understood the scope of the patent, they would be able to come to some terms instead of wasting money on litigation,” he says.

Johnson says their goal with the site is to “ultimately become the central hub of conversation for patents and pending issues.”

Another interesting site if you want to see if a patent already exists on your idea is FreePatentsOnline. The site offers numerous categories you can search, such as US Design Patents, and Recent US Patents and Recent US Patent Applications, both by month. The site also offers a variety of data services, including data feeds, patent analytics, patent data mining and custom research tools, and latent semantic analysis.

If patents are your thing, you should check out these sites.