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One way to fight patent trolls

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  • One way to fight patent trolls

    Great Idea!
    PS Here is their web site: http://www.articleonepartners.com/

    Firms that collect and enforce patents of dubious value—with no intention of creating the invention described in those patents—are the scourge of...


    How To Kill Patent Trolls

    Hire a crowd of amateur sleuths and give out a lot of prize money.

    By Farhad Manjoo|Posted Wednesday, Feb. 29, 2012, at 6:00 PM ET



    ...
    There’s an entire industry devoted to conducting such searches. When companies are sued for patent infringement, or when they’re proactively protecting themselves from an infringement claim, they often hire a prior art search firm to look for related inventions. But such searches tend to be expensive—you usually need to hire researchers in many different countries—and not all that effective, because even professional searchers tend to miss a lot of stuff. More than a decade ago, a young patent attorney named Cheryl Milone had a flash of insight for solving this problem: “I wondered, instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, what if you could ask each piece of hay if it’s a needle?” That might sound like some kind of riddle, but Milone’s insight has transformed patent litigation. In 2008, she founded Article One Partners, a firm that invites amateurs to look for prior art and rewards successful researchers with cash. Over the last few years, Article One Partners has helped hundreds of companies discover prior art to defend against “nonpracticing entities”—jargon for patent trolls—and to protect themselves in new areas of innovation.


    All those searches have resulted in a great deal of winnings. Article One recently announced that it has paid out $2 million in rewards to researchers. Some members of its patent-sleuthing community have even gone full time. A Canadian woman named Stacey Anderson-Redick, a former computer network administrator, is the site’s top earner. She’s made $75,000 in total patent-search winnings.


    Why does Article One’s model result in better patent searches for clients? Milone cites several advantages. First, patent-search contests can attract researchers from all over the world, which is important because prior art found in any language anywhere on the planet is usually applicable in court. Second, because Article One’s search inquiries go out to a large crowd, there’s a good chance that someone in the group can solve a problem without needing to search for the solution. “That happens often, where people say, ‘Hey, I know the answer—I invented it,’ ” Milone says. Article One also encourages people of diverse professional and educational backgrounds to take part in its searches. “There’s a creative component—someone from a bio or pharma background might respond to a high-tech study, and they may come at the question very differently,” Milone says.
    ...
    Chuck
    秋音的爸爸

  • #2
    That's awesome. I should get do some of that free lance.
    “Inside every sane person there’s a madman struggling to get out”
    –The Light Fantastic, Terry Pratchett

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