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I appreciate the idea and love the crowdsourcing model. However, if I need to invalidate a patent, there might often be more urgency than hoping for the crowd s
by ohashi 15y ago
I appreciate the idea and love the crowdsourcing model. However, if I need to invalidate a patent, there might often be more urgency than hoping for the crowd sourced solution. Not to say it isn't viable, but maybe it's something best used in conjunction with a team of experts?
- bryanlarsen 15y agoI would think that offering a $10,000 reward to the first person to come up with the solution would create a better sense of urgency than paying a firm $200 per hour to do the search. The firm gets paid more if it takes them longer, so why would they hurry?
- peterb 15y agoIf this were to gain momentum, then I think the exact opposite would happen. Crowd sourcing is like a human map-reduce. The bad patent is "mapped" to people who know something about the subject and each searches independently sometimes sharing results. Analysis is done to "reduce" the result to provable prior art. Further, I think they should remove the award. I would do this for free. Sites that pay people to contribute almost always fail (think Mahalo vs. Wikipedia). Patent trolls affect all of us. This is something everyone could get behind. Edit: by "exact opposite" I mean crowd-sourcing could produce good results faster, with greater urgency, than any expert.
- dvdkhlng 15y agoAbout doing this for free: thought the same. Receiving money might even complicate things wrt tax or other employment contracts. I wonder if they'd allow one to surrender any payments, instead having them directly donated to EFF, FSF or other non-profit organizations that are fighting with or are endangered by (software) patents.