Peer To Patent

We are pleased to announce the publication of the report on the Peer To Patent Pilot (1.31Mb).

The IPO Peer To Patent pilot was launched on 1 June 2011. Over the following six months 172 applications in technology associated with computing were made available to the public for comment. Public comments on the applications were collated and passed to an Examiner to consider when they completed the examination of the application.

Headline results show:

• The observation rate increased from less than .002% to 6.4%.
• Over 50% of the responses were considered helpful or useful to the Examiner examining the application.
• Some 450 reviewers signed up to the pilot
• The pilot received over 6500 visits from 91 different countries

The key findings of the report are:

• Peer To Patent can make an incremental, but still significant, improvement to the ability of Patent Offices to obtain prior art relevant to patent applications.
• There is considerable interest among the Internet community in this concept.

As a result of the Peer To Patent pilot we are working on an enhancement to our Ipsum service to make it easier for people to make observations on pending patent applications. Future work will consider how we provide enhanced access to those new applications published every week.

Peer To Patent has shown us the power of social media and the findings of the report recognise where we need to put some effort.

• To make the Peer To Patent system work effectively, effort will need to be put in to effectively "seed" communities who will be willing to contribute to the programme over an extended period of time.
• To use more effectively the Internet community, there needs to be clear communication of which applications would particularly benefit from assistance, for example by clearer communication of the results of examiner’s searches.
• The use of social networking technologies such as Twitter^RTM and blogs can be a highly effective method for reaching out to certain communities, specifically in the computing sphere. They enable the effective leveraging of existing communication networks spanning the Internet.

For further information please e-mail Peer To Patent UK.