Cyberinfrastructure and Patent Thickets: Challenges and Responses

Abstract

This article presents a survey of responses to patent thickets. The first group involves efforts to either keep questionable patents from ever issuing or removing them from patent space after they have issued — in particular, the “Peer–to–Patent” project, also known as “Community Patent Review.” Proposed by Professor Beth Noveck (2006) and subsequently incorporated into a pilot project by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Peer–to–Patent will use distributed online communities to assist in the review of patents for questions of novelty and obviousness and by enabling a virtual community of practice in a field to suggest prior art to the patent examiner. Its success will depend on the ability to leverage developments in cyberinfrastructure in the areas of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and information retrieval. This article also suggests extending Peer–to–Patent into the realm of patent reexamination and post–grant opposition, which are mechanisms that can remove invalid patents once they have been issued.