A NEW website that is devoted to busting questionable patents handed out
its first prizes last week. Four winners each received a $10,000 bounty
for providing examples of 鈥減rior art鈥� that could invalidate targeted
patents.
BountyQuest (www.bountyquest.com) says its mission is to help get rid of
patents that should never have been granted in the first place. The bounties are
put up by other companies鈥攐ften ones that are being sued for violating the
patents in question. You get the bounty for finding suitable prior art, though
the patent is not then automatically invalid. Someone still has to go to court
to kill the patent.
Clarke McAllister of Eugene, Oregon, pocketed one of the first bounties by
submitting company brochures and an article from a skiing magazine on his own
invention, a ski-lift pass in the form of a reprogrammable electronic bracelet.
The documents could invalidate a patent for 鈥渁lterable tickets鈥�.
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Musician Perry Leopold also won a bounty by submitting his 1987 paper on
sharing electronic music over computer networks. It could bust a patent on a
scheme that would allow customers to download a free sample of music before
buying the full version.
鈥淚t鈥檚 a source of black humour to me. It鈥檚 surreal these patents were ever
granted,鈥� says Leopold. The other two bounty winners have put recent patents on
databases and network routers in jeopardy.
Joshua Kaplan, president of Intouch Group of San Francisco, is sceptical
about Leopold鈥檚 prior art. Intouch Group holds the music-samples patent, and is
suing Amazon.com and other companies. 鈥淭he reality is that we looked at a lot of
prior art. I would find it hard to believe that somebody published an article in
1987 that invalidates all 18 of our claims,鈥� he says.
Gregory Aharonian, publisher of the Patent News Service, is a
regular critic of the US Patent Office, but even so he thinks BountyQuest
doesn鈥檛 address the real problem. 鈥淚n terms of improving the quality of patents
being issued, what they鈥檙e doing will have no effect,鈥� he says.