itemscope="" itemscope=""

Crowdsourcing Company Finds Prior Art

As reported in the Wall Street Journal’s Digits Blog, a “crowdsourcing” company known as Article One Partners has been asked to help find prior art to invalidate patents owned by Paul Allen’s Interval Licensing. As previously reported, Interval Licensing has sued nine technology companies (Apple Inc., Google Inc. and its YouTube subsidiary, Facebook Inc., Yahoo Inc., AOL Inc., eBay Inc., Netflix Inc., OfficeMax Inc. and Staples Inc.) for patent infringment.

Crowdsourcing refers to “the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call.” (Wikipedia). According to the Article One website, “Article One Partners uses the power of the global online community to research evidence that relates to the claims of novelty of selected patents.” Essentially, what this entails is for a large number of researchers to sign up for a prior art search project whereby those who find the most relevant prior art are monetarily rewarded. The entire process is done online, and researchers from around the world may participate.

Although the company says it provides payments as high as $50,000, it appears that in most cases the payments to the researchers are much lower, in many cases just $100. Somewhat vaguely, the company states that “about 5% of our annual net profits to our community based on a Researcher’s level of participation on Article One, as indicated by the points accumulated on our site.”

This seems like a good deal for the company, but not very good for the researchers who do most of the work. One wonders if this model would attract a sufficient number of good quality searchers. We remain skeptical.

Trackbacks

  1. lesson plans tucson city golf says:

    lesson plans tucson city golf…

    Crowdsourcing Company Finds Prior Art « IP Nuggets…

  2. T.Szideas.com says:

    T.Szideas.com…

    Crowdsourcing Company Finds Prior Art « IP Nuggets…