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The Peer To Patent project is an initiative that seeks to assist patent offices in improving patent quality by gathering public input in a structured, productive manner. Peer To Patent is the first social-software project directly linked to decision-making by the federal government.〔("Peer To Patent: government using social networking" )〕 An initial pilot project in collaboration with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) was completed June 15, 2009.〔(Press release, "June 15 is Last Day to Submit Applications for Peer Review Pilot" )〕 That pilot examined more than 220 patent applications in the fields of software and business methods. The Peer To Patent project has issued two anniversary reports from the initial pilot (〔("First Anniversary Report" )〕 and〔("Second Anniversary Report" )〕), and a final report from the initial pilot is pending. Following the conclusion of the initial pilot the USPTO undertook an evaluation of Peer To Patent assisted by students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. That evaluation concluded that the program had merit and should be continued.〔("Evaluation of the Peer To Patent Pilot Program" )〕 On October 19, 2010, the USPTO and New York Law School jointly announced a new pilot program commencing October 25, 2010, and continuing through September 30, 2011 (with the review period extending through December 31, 2011).〔("USPTO Launches Second Peer To Patent Pilot in Collaboration with New York Law School" )〕 This new pilot will not only include patent applications covering subject matter included in the initial pilot, it will now include telecommunications, speech recognition, translation, biotechnology, bioinformatics and biopharmaceuticals.〔("Listing of classes and subclasses qualified for the FY2011 Pilot" )〕 Other patent offices involved in pilot programs include IP Australia,〔("Peer To Patent Australia" )〕 the Japan Patent Office,〔("Peer To Patent Japan" )〕 and the Korean Intellectual Property Office.〔("Community patent review trialed" )〕 The UK Intellectual Property Office announced on November 4, 2010, that it would commence a pilot in 2011〔("Independent review launched to ensure IP system promotes growth" )〕 and the pilot commenced on 1 June 2011.〔("Intellectual Property Office - Peer-to-patent homepage" )〕 == Justification and purpose == Patents go to the heart of invention, a key driver of technological progress and economic vitality. When the patent system functions correctly, it rewards only meritorious inventions—those that are useful, novel, and not obvious. This in turn encourages more people to exercise their ingenuity and effort to create new inventions. However, for a proper balance to be struck, the system must avoid awarding patents to discourage inventions that lack merit. When the system becomes inconsistent in recognizing true invention, inappropriately issued patents become obstacles for innovation in that technology area. This raises, directly or indirectly, the costs of doing business in that particular area. The number of patents in the most active jurisdictions (including the ones piloting Peer-to-Patent) has grown over the past few decades. The rise in patent applications has also placed stress on the patent offices themselves. For example, the USPTO October 31, 2010 had a backlog of about 700,000 patent applications, which is one and a half times the highest number of applications the USPTO has processed in any given year.〔("USPTO Data Visualization Center" )〕 Peer To Patent is focused on helping patent offices perform high-quality examinations of pending patent applications by enlisting the public to help find ''and explain'' prior art. Prior art are references that predate the date of conception of at least some of the features of a given claimed invention. Prior art can include earlier patents, academic papers, magazine articles, web pages, and even physical examples. Patent examiners compare a claimed invention with the prior art to determine if a given invention is both new (i.e. novel) and not obvious to a person of ordinary skill and creativity of the invention. Prior to the initiation of Peer To Patent, U.S. patent examiners had the sole responsibility for searching for prior art. Patent examiners have a time budget of a few hours in which to conduct such searches. Peer To Patent attempts to improve the patent process by markedly expanding the prior art search. The reasoning behind the project is that if prior art exists for an invention, particularly non-patent prior art, someone in the world knows about it. This knowledgeable person may be a competitor in the same field, a student or professor, or the owner of an earlier embodiment of the invention. Peer To Patent encourages such people to submit examples of prior art and creates communities of people worldwide who are interested in discovering prior art. Peer To Patent uses social software features to facilitate discussion amongst groups of volunteer experts. Users can upload prior art references, participate in discussion forums, rate other user submissions, add research references, invite others, and more. This helps the examiners focus their attention on the submission(s) of prior art that have the highest relevance to an application. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Peer-to-Patent」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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