ARTICLE ONE PARTNERS
Using crowdsourcing for prior art searches enables researchers to unearth information that might otherwise be tricky to find. WIPR reports.
Tey say that too many cooks spoil the broth. Too many people, regardless of expertise, don’t always produce the best end product. Patent owners know this, and it leads some to pick a small team of specialist researchers when enquiring about a patent’s validity. Essentially, they trust a select few.
But if too many cooks spoil the broth, many hands might also make light work. Article One Partners (AOP), a company that coordinates worldwide research on prior art, prefers a crowd- sourcing model. Using 22,000 researchers, hailing from 180 countries, the company aims to match clients’ requests by spreading its wings far and wide. Te world is its oyster.
Placing their trust in this expansive network, patent owners ask for help. Whether they are launching a new product, trying to invalidate a rival’s patent, or defending a patent in court, companies need information quickly.
“Generally, studies take four to six weeks,” says Cheryl Milone, who founded AOP in 2008 to add a “crucial level” of review to the US patent system—strengthening “legitimate” patents and reducing “unjust” patent monopolies.
“In my years as a patent attorney, I spent countless hours and late nights searching for prior art. I was struck by how deficient the process was, and knew there had to be a better way. Te combination of globalisation, technology and the economy has paved the way for new and disruptive business models such as crowd sourcing to thrive,” she says.
Searching for prior art can be like finding a needle in a haystack. But aided by thousands of researchers, who are motivated by financial reward, patent owners can be confident the crowd will find a smoking gun, if one exists. Milone refers to the research community’s “different competencies”, the first being that the more seasoned researchers “know most of the standard places to look, which are the core types of references from a traditional search”.
“Other members of the community, including some of
those traditional researchers, will use
proprietary databases or hard-to-access databases, maybe through a library, to give themselves an advantage of finding parts and materials.” Te ideal scenario, she says, is for someone to read one of the requests and say, “I invented that”.
“When you aggregate all of these sources and
extend them to a worldwide level, you’re able to dramatically increase the quality and the results.”
AOP, which has rewarded researchers with around $2.8 million to date, demands they send in references from all their searches. Many will examine existing US patents—which are all fully digitised—so it’s perhaps unsurprising that the most valuable references come from non-patent literature, which is typically harder to find.
“For non-patent literature, foreign language
articles are generally translated into English in abstract form only, so the full text and footnotes are missed,” Milone says. “Tere is a tremendous
www.worldipreview.com
World Intellectual Property Review September/October 2012
59
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128