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Some of you may already know that, in June of 2007,
to ease the backlog of patent examinations, the New York Law
School's Institute for the Information Law and Policy, together with the USPTO,
started a program whereby, through the internet, patent applications
are reviewed, not by lone examiners, but by tens of thousands of
experts in the field, thus ensuring a wide scale rating system. In the U.S., this peer review system
to search for prior art is called Peer to Patent, or P2P.
This month, the Japanese launched their own pilot version of P2P, called "Community Patent Review." The program was
initiated by the JPO, in collaboration with several of major IT companies.
IBM Japan,
Fujitsu, Ricoh, and others have submitted their patent
applications and are having several hundred reviewers, including university
researchers, express their expert opinions on the novelty of the
invention.
By expanding the research range for prior art determination, the
program aims to reduce the number of patents invalidated after
registration. Currently, JPO examiners use a database to search the existence
or absence of prior literature among academic papers and pre-existing patents.
However, JPO examiners are not capable of of investigating
academic papers and manuals that are not included in this database. With
outside experts
bringing
their
own
knowledge and search capabilities to the examination process,
the JPO hopes to improve the quality of the examination
process.
If the JPO feels that the program has successfully met its aims,
it will call upon more companies to participate in the program
for fiscal 2009.
(Posted June 10, 2008) |
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