Apologies for a being a bit late to the party on this publicly available patent review service.

The Peer-to-Patent Community Patent Review (Pilot) web site launched about 4 weeks ago. It’s being built and maintained by the New York Law School with the full cooperation of the U.S. Patent Office.

From the web site:

Help the USPTO find the information relevant to assessing the claims of pending patent applications…The Peer-to-Patent pilot will review 250 applications in Technology Center 2100 (Computer Architecture, Software and Information Security), Selected applications will be reviewed sooner by the USPTO.

What Can You Do On the Site?

The Peer-to-Patent Web site enables those who sign up to:
+ review and discuss posted patent applications
+ share research to locate references to relevant earlier publications
+ submit these prior art references with an explanation of relevance
+ annotate and evaluate submitted prior art
+ winnow the top ten prior art references, which, together with commentary, will be forwarded directly to the USPTO

As of Wednesday evening, about 1060 people have registered to participate in the process and use the site.

The Peer-to-Patent blog also points out that their is a P-T-P auditorium in Second Life.

This week, three recently published patents applications were placed in the Peer-to-Patent system:
From the news release:
Microsoft’s application (#20070136608) is for an invention that will allow copyright owners and media sellers to profit from the off-line transfer of media between buyers and sellers. According to the application, the invention is intended to create an off-line economy for digital media that will store proof and details for off-line transactions. This record will then be used to allot portions of the transaction to the copyright owner, and also to the seller, as an incentive for creating the transaction. The off-line economy will equip copyright owners with a tool to aid them in profiting from their properties, while simultaneously creating an inexpensive channel for media distribution that is accessible to buyers.

Intel’s application
(# 20070130448) deals with increasing computer processor efficiency. Computer processors predict where certain information is stored after it has been used so that it can be retrieved as directly as possible; an incorrect prediction by the processor significantly slows down performance. Intel’s patent application describes a stack tracker that generates a distance value corresponding to a relative distance between a load instruction and a previous store instruction. According to the application, the distance value generated by the stack tracker can then be used to help minimize incorrect predictions so that the processor can perform more efficiently.

+ IBM’s application (#20070150488) addresses the problem of moving a database from its current source system to a new target system that often has different characteristics from the source system. According to the application, the invention describes a method for optimizing the migration of a database by collecting details (parameters) about the source system and the target system in order to generate configuration information that can be used to fine tune the database’s operation on the target system.

Source: NYLS and USPTO

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 12:31 am and is filed under Databases, Directories, and Guides, Government Documents and Political Information, Intellectual Property, Software and Web-Based Applications, Source File, Technology and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.