14 DAY TRIAL // Patents are becoming a bigger and bigger problem for tech companies, large and small. The big ones get to duke it out in the courtrooms to great spectacle, but at least they have the money to do it. Smaller companies are at the mercy of patent trolls. Who have no mercy.
Google is one of the companies that's been most affected by the proliferation of patent arsenals and it's also one of the few that is actually doing something to improve the system.
Recently, it improved its patent search engine to make it easier to find prior art. In that same vein, it is now hooking up with Stack Exchange and the US Patents and Trademarks Office to create Ask Patents, a new stack exchange dedicated to finding prior art to patent applications.
The idea is to rely on the wisdom of the crowd and the power of a lot experts pooling their resources to plow through patent applications and weed out the bad ones.
Of course, people just pointing out that some "invention" is obvious or that it's been done before years ago is not enough if it can't reach the people who take the decisions.
Luckily, the USPTO is involved; in fact it was a driving force in getting the project off the ground. At the heart of it is a new provision in the new America Invents Act which says that the USPTO can receive prior art submissions from anyone.
In fact, the USPTO will be building an online tool, linked to Ask Patents for just this thing. And Google's Patent Search will be adding a link to Ask Patents to each and every patent entry it holds.
Of course, the patent system is bad from the inside out; this will only help prevent new ridiculous patents from being issued. But there are tens of thousands out there already.