The Washington Post writes1:

The United States Patent Office will soon allow members of the online community to post and evaluate information concerning patent proposals on a new wiki-style Web site. “For the first time in history, it allows the patent-office examiners to open up their cubicles and get access to a whole world of technical experts,” said IBM’s David J. Kappos. The pilot project will start this Spring and feature a community rating system that prioritizes the most respected comments. During the pilot phase of the project about 250 software design applications will be posted on the Web site since examiners have an especially difficult time finding documentation for them. Any user can post information relating to patent proposals, but a “reputation system” will be put in place to rank submitted materials and measure the expertise of contributors. In order to develop a reliable reputation system, the Patent Office has forged partnerships with several e-commerce specialists. Patent examiners will be able to award “gold stars” to those who provide exceptionally useful information. The information submitted will eventually be voted on by registered users, with the top 10 items being sent along to an examiner who will make the final decision on the patent. “The idea is to make something as important as decision-making about innovation more transparent to the public and more accountable to the public,” says new York Law School Professor Beth Noveck. The system is expected to go through some changes, specifically the voting process, which may limit the ability to vote or give more weight to some votes.

This experiment has some deficiencies, as Gregory Aharonian points out.

Professor Beth Noveck herself mentions some doubts about her Peer to Patent project:

“There is some irony, of course, to creating open, peer review processes to augment closed, proprietary patent grants. We are applying techniques and lessons of open source programming to an arena that is the anathema to most open source adherents. Arguably, we are engaging the community in closing off innovation from the community. This makes sense, first, because undoing patents altogether, including software patents, is not politically in the offing.”

We do not share Prof. Noveck’s pessimism regarding the possibility of letting elected legislators decide. The European Parliament and national parliaments have repeatedly expressed their will to forbid software patents.

As we have argued for years, submission of prior art is not an alternative to legislative action.

The FFII’s Gauss project actually has been used occasionally in a similar way to argue against certain patents, like against one of the MS Open XML European patent applications:

An interesting question is if the EPO would give this submittant a gold star?

The core of the quality problem was already addressed by Tim O’Reilly and Jeff Bezos with their BountyQuest venture. The reason it failed is the basis for the FFII’s examination reform proposal.

In BountyQuest the examination fee was not paid by the polluter but by volunteering victims. It requires that one victim stands up and pays up on behalf of the public. All the other victims benefit as free-riders.

The FFII proposal shows how the incentives would need to be set straight if “peer2patent” examination is to work:

Privatize Examination, Make Bad Patenters Pay

The system of obligatory patent examination should be replaced by a system where patents are registered free of charge on the Internet, and examination is performed by private parties who, when they find an invalid patent claim, are entitled to charge an examination fee from the patentee

The European Patent Office has taken interest in the Gauss project and is preparing to build a similar wiki-based system.

At a workshop conducted by the EPO in Munich last Friday, FFII representative Alberto Barrionuevo stated that this will be of very limited use, unless they reward the “net examiners” in an adequate (monetary) way:

They are threatening software developers with a 
flood of patent applications, and now, that they 
themselves can't master that flood, they think 
that software developers will come along and help 
them out for free.

In traditional patent fields, companies often file 
oppositions against their competitors' patents.
In the software field there are very few 
oppositions, because it's not worthwhile.
Why then should it be worthwhile for volunteers?

Additionally, this kind of process can make sense 
only if you can post against the patent during its 
whole lifespan, not during a short few months 
during the application period.

In summary, peer review by small players, such as 
SMEs and individual Internet users, is meaningful 
only if the patent applicant pays.
Opponents need to be rewarded for their their 
examination effort, and applicants should be 
penalized for polluting the field with obscenely 
broad monopoly claims.

It may be difficult for the patent offices to 
realise this, since their thinking is centered on 
large corporate customers
such as IBM, who can easily afford to spend 
thousands of specialist manhours every month 
wading through a hundred thousand lines
of unreadable legalese text.

See also the discussion at digitalmajority.org.