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.
