The Peer-to-patent project has been active for a year now and a status report for the work has just been published. The report covers the time from June 2007 to April 2008 In that time the  Peer-to-Patent project attracted more than 2,000 users and 173 items of prior art was submitted on 40 applications by participants from 140 countries. That is actually quite interesting.Â
Even more interesting is the fact that 21% of the USPTO examiners stated that the prior art submitted was unacessible to the office. The users dig up material hidden from normal people and not in databases…impressive. The prior art uncovered is used in 36% of the rejections.
So what did the users commit to the project?
- 401 discussion comments
- 173 pieces of prior art
- 189 prior art ratings
- 55 annotations of prior art posted by others
- 221 tags to describe a patent application
- 39 items of research relating to a specific patent application
- 76 research resources for the site as a whole
The 40 patentents reviewed were from these companies:
| IBM | 9 |
| GE | 7 |
| Intel | 5 |
| Red Hat | 1 |
| Microsoft | 3 |
| Sun Microsystems | 5 |
| Softwired AG | 1 |
| Yahoo | 1 |
| HP | 4 |
| Intension Inc. | 1 |