It was with incredible joy that I discovered today that some of my late night musings on crowd-sourcing the patent application process (see here and here) are actually well under way at the patent office. There is an initiative in the software world called Peer to Patent that has received a test case approval from the USPTO and is supported by small companies like IBM and Microsoft. It's substantively similar to what I had proposed, and this one is already moving.
This is an awesome step forward, and I'm quite hopeful it will soon be extended to other fields like consumer products. I was a year late with my idea as Beth Noveck had started blogging on the thread last summer and there was even a Wired article...
Go Beth and the USPTO!
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