USPTO and Reputation

With a tip of the hat to Seth Levine and Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group, the Washington Post had an interesting article this week about how the US Patent and Trademark Office is opening up Patent applications for commentary, apparently in a Wikipedia-like manner.

The good news is that this appears to be a rational, thoughtful step forward for patent processing. The number of dubious patents that have been issued is truly impressive. An open, community-driven public-comment process has the potential to materially limit the issuance of sub-optimal patents.

The bad news is that it seems probable that the USPTO is going to have some real challenges in policing this community of commenters. It would be unfortunate to see something this important get brushed aside at the end of the day due to bad actors. This is a manageable problem - let's hope it gets managed properly.

Shawn