UK Intellectual Property Office Implements Peer-to-Patent Pilot For Online Review Of Patent Applications

The United Kingdom’s Intellectual Property Office has introduced its peer-to-patent initiative in a pilot program that will last until the end of 2011. Announced by the UK’s Minister of Intellectual Property in a press release on June 1, 2011, the program is an effort to tap into “crowd sourcing” to provide patent examiners with additional prior art resources during the patent application process. The peer-to-patent initiative allows third parties to participate in the review of patent applications by offering their own observations and prior art.

The program provides a web-based portal through which registered users can review published patent applications and participate as a community in considering patentability. The UK’s pilot is initially being restricted to a limited number of patent applications, all from the fields of computing and electronic data processing. Each application selected to be included in the program will remain open for comment for a period of three months.

Participation in the program is a multi-step process. It begins by finding or searching for patent applications to be considered, and reviewing and discussing patent claims and information about them. Third parties seeking to add their own observations need to research published resources relevant to the claims, and identify and explain any prior art . The community is able to annotate, evaluate and rank submitted prior art. Participants then have the opportunity to create a “top ten” list of prior art references generated for each application and forward it to the Intellectual Property Office for consideration in the examination of the application.

The Intellectual Property Office has created a blog to provide information on the program and a tutorial to support its use by those interested in participating in online review of patent applications. In doing so it likely hopes to ride the wave of momentum developing around community-based attempts to improve the patenting process.  The UK pilot program is not the first of its kind – its implementation follows other governmental efforts at implementing peer-to-patent programs have been made in the United States, Australia, and Japan. Interestingly, the private sector has also recently become much more involved in attempts to participate in the patent process – Article One Partners, for example, recently launched what it calls its Litigation Avoidance Program.

As third party patent review efforts gain steam, it will be interesting to see to what extent they become active components of the patent application process from a governmental perspective, and whether or not public or private sector initiatives prove better at improving patent quality. One issue with governmental initiatives like the UK’s new peer-to-patent system is that it may simply prove too onerous given the amount of work that must be done by those wishing to participate. National laws will also need to be harmonized – for example, US patent law does not currently permit third party participation in the patent application process. However, such peer-to-patent systems have powerful potential to improve the quality of patent claims, as a patent applicant can track the review process and alter the claims accordingly before official examination begins.