Article One Partners Offers Bounty
Article One Partners, LLC launched as a new global community to legitimize the validity of patents. Community members, who Article One calls Advisors, have an opportunity to send in previously hard to find evidence of validity for high profile patents. By tapping the unique knowledge and referral networks of our Advisors, this publicly available evidence known as prior art can be discovered. Article One analyzes the prior art to determine whether it can show patents to be legitimized or invalid. If Article One forms an opinion that patents are invalid, Advisors earn up to U.S. $50,000, with $1,000,000 total being offered for launch. Advisors who actively build the community also earn premium compensation in Article One's Profit Sharing Plan of about five percent (5%) of the company's net annual profit.
The press release issued by Article One Partners generated a lot of press and buzz in the blogosphere last week, much of it restating the company's PR, but not all of it was uncritical.
Mike Masnick at Techdirt says the new company's business plan "sounds like a photocopy of BountyQuest's original plan."
Julian Sanchez at ars technica thinks this "crowdsourcing patent startup could use dose of own medicine."
What do you think? Will the business methods patent application of Article One Partners get past the prior art of BountyQuest? And what about Bilski?
UPDATE: Cheryl Milone, President, articleonepartners.com comments below.
You know how sometimes you hear a theme every once in a while, and you don’t make much of it? But then you hear it five times in a week, and suddenly you say whoah, something’s going on here!
I appreciate the opportunity to clarify a few points in your comments. First, we are thrilled about the discussion and comments of the patent community. Patent quality is the key issue in our view and the focus on this topic based on Article One’s launch is productive.
Second, to provide some feedback on comments:
Mr. Masnick’s comment about BountyQuest: I had the good fortune to work with BountyQuest at its inception. Article One is comparable to the good parts of BountyQuest – the success of the research approach. BountyQuest had 8 winners and paid its rewards in each of those cases. Here is a link to their results and an identification of the winners who were compensated for their prior art submissions. http://web.archive.org/web/20010404230428/bountyquest.com/winner/winnermain.htm
It was very gratifying to assist in this success, as I had a pending patent application on the model. The founder of BountyQuest beat my invention date, but asked me to come on board. BountyQuest was way ahead of its time. It preceded LinkedIn and Facebook on the power of social networking and the highly successful peertopatent.org, topcoder.com and innocentive.com. The company ultimately did not succeed, primarily due the 2001 dot.com collapse and 9-11, 2001 and the ensuing economic contraction. BountyQuest relied on third party “bounties,” which were severely reduced in the economic climate.
Fast-forward 8 years, the power of crowd sourcing is well known. In fact, among the many successes of our launch last week was being contacted by several third parties to ask about hosting Studies. We are considering that model as an add-on. However, instead of relying on third parties to host the Studies, Article One self selects its core Patent Studies to ensure a consistent number of available Studies for its community increases the incentives on a Study basis and provides profit sharing. There is much talk of citizen review of government grants, we provide this opportunity to the public, to weigh in on patent rights for which the public pays monopoly pricing and the societal costs of increased litigations. We hope to energize patent reform in a manner that directly benefits the source of it – the public.
Julian Sanchez’ comment about patent rights. The publication referred to in the lead article is an old version that is no longer being prosecuted. I recognized the over breadth and narrowed the scope in March 2008. I have appreciated Julian’s openness in receiving this information. I followed-up with the correct version (published in the PCT) and Julian provided it to his readers as an update to his article referenced above. I look forward to further discussion about it. I certainly would appreciate input on prior art, and I am submitting it to peertopatent.org when it publishes in the U.S. next year.
I appreciate your valuable knowledge and time.
Best,
Cheryl Milone
President, articleonepartners.com