Re: [Patents] incentive to participate?

[Gregory Aharonian <srctran@world.std.com>]

>In the paper ""Peer to Patent": Collective Intelligence and Intellectual
>Property Reform" by Beth Simone Noveck there is a Q&A section with a
>very good question:
>
>Q:  *Isnt there a lack of incentive to participate?*
>
>The answer is not that convincing IMO, but maybe there is a vague
>promise of a bounty in the statement "we will build these incentives
>for participation into the system"?:

In my obnoxious opinion, I would say her answer is nonsense of the naive
in that it ignores reality and history.  Historically, there have been
other attempts to use the public to help the U.S. Patent Office collect
prior art.  They worked for a very short time before people got bored
with the daily grind of looking at mostly idiotic patents and/or patent
applications.

Reality-wise, who does this type of work now?  Two people mostly - patent
examiners and patent searchers as myself, because we are PAID to do so,
which for sustained interest in searching patents is the best incentive
- money.  Beth Nowit, being an academic that doesn't have to worry about
such things with her tenure, overly estimates the impact of self-impact
and hostility to patents as something that will drive many people in
the public to voluntarily help search for patents.  Indeed, other than
a small group of people who know little about science, engineering, law
or economics, there are few who are passionately against software
patents to want to aid the daily grind of patent searching.

IBM choose Beth to head their latest initiative for the same reason IBM
earlier choose another academic to head their earlier initiative (the
failed Software Patent Institute) - IBM has no interest in seeing this
succeed, and knows that much like the SPI, without steady sources of
money, there won't be enough interested people to make the project
succeed.

Indeed, think of the fundamental stupidity of the whole project.  IBM
says that it will put up some of its patents for public scrutiny (a
bit of scam there since many IBM patent applications are already being
published by the PTO).  But in turn, IBM engineers will scrutinize
the patent applications of other companies to not be at a disadvantage.
Why then doesn't IBM just have its engineers thoroughly search IBM
patent applications (which it doesn't do that often), and encourage
other companies to thoroughly search their applications (which most of
them don't do), and also have all of these companies donate prior art
resources to the Patent Office so examiners can more easily do prior
art searches?

So enjoy IBM once again scamming the PTO with another bogus effort to
help improve patent quality.  Why does IBM do this?  Because it 
distracts the PTO from initiating more serious efforts to improve
patent quality, which is something IBM doesn't want.  So what better
way to frustrate the PTO than to pretend to help the PTO?  It is 
almost comical if you think about.

Greg Aharonian