Patent "Bounties" Attempting a Comeback
Borrowing from a page book of Peer-to-Patent and the long-defunct Bountyquest, the company Article One Partners, LLC has launched "a new global community to legitimize the validity of patents."
Basically, the system works to recruit community members (also known as "Advisors") to search and report prior art against high profile patents. Article One then analyzes the prior art to determine whether it can invalidate a specific patent. If Article One forms an opinion that patents are invalid, Advisors earn up to U.S. $50,000, with $1,000,000 total being offered for launch. Advisors who actively build the community also earn premium compensation in Article One's Profit Sharing Plan of about five percent (5%) of the company's net annual profit.
According to Article One, "the result is a highly-rewarded community providing a citizen's review of U.S. patents to justify monopoly pricing for true innovation and energize U.S. patent reform."
Read the press release here.
Visit Article One's website here.
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I would be very interested in your and your readers' opinions whether articleonepartners.com's approach of a citizen's review can help to achieve patent reform. What do you think?
How do they select the patents posted on the site?
I'm quoting AOP's FAQ section:
"How does AOP choose the patents for its Patent Studies?
For our Patent Studies, we choose patents that have an impact on the public (which has to pay premium prices during the monopoly period) or on research (when research areas are blocked as a result of a patent). However, it is our promise never to post patents if the result could possibly harm the public. Examples include patents tied to medications for 'orphan diseases,' those rare afflictions suffered by less than 250,000 people. These medications are rare and costly ' and if one of them is pulled from the shelves as the result of a patent that turns out to be invalid, patients could be left without treatment."
Interesting. It looks like they expect to make much of their money by taking positions (long or short) in subject companies based on the research turned up by their contributors -- before they make that knowledge public, of course.
Nice idea! How much money could you make if you had advance knowledge that the Apple iPhone or a top-selling game console (or a top-selling PDA!) was about to escape (or succumb to) a high profile patent attack?
And if you had such information, would you hand it over to a 3rd party (like AOP) just to enter a raffle?
Yes, it's a rip off. Nobody in their right mind would give the art to this firm. They would send it to the parties involved in the action in return for millions. That's the problem with these sites. The gathering of art is way too hard in those cases for your avg joe, and someone who is not the avg joe isn't stpid enough to hand the art over to them.
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