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Frequently Asked Questions What is WikiPatents? WikiPatents is a public community that reviews US patents and pending patent applications. The public can add prior art references for a given patent, vote on the relevancy of both original and user-added references, and make comments about how the prior art is related to a patent. Users may also vote on various market and technical merits of patents and patent applications. Why was WikiPatents created? WikiPatents was established to support and invigorate the US patent system by adding greater clarity to the public's grant of a limited patent monopoly in exchange for the inventor's advancement of technology. Public patent review through WikiPatents addresses many of today’s concerns of the USPTO and intellectual property experts, clarifying for the public the extent to which a patent has genuinely advanced technology. WikiPatents is intended to be the crossroads at which inventors, engineers, scientists, patent owners, competitors, litigants, the open source community, IP attorneys, patent Examiners, and other concerned members of the patent community openly share relevant and valuable information about specific patents and patent applications. For example, independent inventors can advertise offers to license their patent. Litigants can find crucial prior art overlooked by a patent Examiner during examination of the patent application. Patent owners seeking to cut costs in maintaining expensive patent portfolios can obtain valuable information regarding the perceived validity and value of their patents. And researchers, engineers, and scientists will be enriched by the dialog surrounding their technologies of interest. How does WikiPatents address the needs of the USPTO? The WikiPatents Community was established largely in response to the USPTO's focus on improving patent quality. “The USPTO clearly has a responsibility to do everything it can to improve America's patent system. That is why we are undertaking this collaborative approach – putting forth quality and efficiency proposals for the patent community to give us feedback,” stated Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property Jon Dudas. “Applicants and the public deserve certainty. This focus on quality of applications and closure of the examination process will provide more certainty. Everyone agrees that better quality input will result in a better quality end product.” (See http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/06-26.htm.) By allowing the interested public to add and vote on overlooked prior art and to submit public comments on the merits of issued patents, WikiPatents provides an invaluable resource to patent Examiners reviewing related pending applications. How does WikiPatents strengthen the US Patent system? Patent Examiners do an excellent job reviewing patents in the limited amount of time they are allotted to review patents. However, no single individual can accumulate all of the most relevant information to review a patent within 10 hours, 100 hours, or even 1,000 hours. Let's face it... even experienced, sophisticated, and well-funded litigants, in the course of a 2-year litigation, struggle to find the best prior art or other information needed to invalidate a “bad” patent. The general public and the patent community, on the other hand, created the prior art. Prior art is the collective knowledge written or practiced by the public previous to a patented invention. Who better to identify the most relevant prior art than the public? The combined experience of the public through the WikiPatents Community can provide the information that Examiners, patent owners, investors, litigants, and others need in order to weigh the merits of patents and patent applications. Information added by WikiPatents Community Members provides transparency to the patent system – indicating to the public, with greater visibility, the true and proper scope of each patent. How does WikiPatents help the open source community? WikiPatents enables the open source community to communicate with the USPTO by publicly posting relevant prior art and other resources for patent Examiner review. "For years now, we have been hearing concerns from the software community about the patent system," Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property Jon Dudas has commented. "It is important that those in the open source community are joining [the] USPTO to provide resources that are key to examining software-related applications." (See http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/speeches/06-02.htm.) Relevant information posted on WikiPatents by interested and qualified members of the OSC will help the public and the USPTO assess the true novelty and value of pending and issued patents. Can the user-added information in the WikiPatents database be relied upon? Currently, you can vote on comments based on your own evaluation of their helpfulness. In the near future, we hope to provide even more incentive for users to only post the most helpful comments, and more ability for readers to evaluate the helpfulness of a given comment. And, while we attempt to remove abusive comments that are inconsistent with the purpose of WikiPatents, as explained in the "Terms & Disclaimer" statement agreed to by every member of the WikiPatents Community, WikiPatents, Inc. makes absolutely no guarantee as to the accuracy, usefulness, comprehensiveness, “up-to-date-ness”, or relevance of any of its users additions to the database. The user-added information contained on this site is not to be relied upon with any degree of certainty. Use the information on this site at your own risk. What if the date of a prior art reference doesn't actually predate a patented invention and qualify as prior art? In general, to qualify as prior art, the date of a reference should predate that of a patented invention. But, if in doubt, post the reference. The patent Examiners, Courts, and other interested parties will figure out the details during their formal review of the references you submit. How is WikiPatents monitored? Users are key to the monitoring process. WikiPatents Members should vote on the helpfulness of comments to help the public sift through the best content. Members should also report any instance of another user who publishes false, disparaging, vicious, misleading, derogatory, obscene, degenerative, or malicious comments, who use crude or obscene language, who clearly spam the database with votes and comments without proper knowledge or research, or who simply rant and rave about political or personal agendas that are not directly relevant to the merits of a patent under review. The WikiPatents Community was developed to support and enhance the patent system by allowing the public to add accurate, objective, nonjudgmental, relevant information about patents and patent applications. WikiPatents reserves the right to take action against those who abuse their Member rights. As an inventor, owner, patent attorney, or patent agent, do I have a duty to supply information from WikiPatents.com to the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO)? Under 37 C.F.R. 1.56, those materially involved in the preparation and prosecution of a patent application have a duty of candor with the USPTO. This rule requires those individuals to submit relevant references and other information to a patent Examiner during review of the associated patent application. If you are aware of such references or other information on WikiPatents.com because it has been posted to the pending patent application or to any related patent or pending application, then you should consult a patent attorney to seriously consider that information in view of 37 C.F.R. 1.56. What patents & patent applications are currently contained in WikiPatents? The WikiPatents database currently contains HTML text and PDF images of all US Patents 3,930,271 to the most recently published US patents (over 7,200,000). We are committed to continually updating WikiPatents regularly. WikiPatents also includes published US patent applications from recent years, as well as selected GB (Great Britain) patents and CA (Canada) patents. If you notice a patent missing from the sequence, please contact us and let us know the patent number that is missing. Does WikiPatents provide free PDF documents? Yes. To view/download/print the PDF image of any patent, simply click on the "PDF" link on the floating navigation toolbar of any patent page. What’s coming soon on WikiPatents.com (beyond the BETA version)? WikiPatents will soon contain all published US patent applications. The ability to provide and view public commentary on pending patent applications will potentially change the outcome of issued patents! We also have many site improvements and innovations coming soon! Stay tuned and feel free to contact us with your feedback and suggestions. How can I help? Join the WikiPatents Community and start reviewing patents that interest you. Please also recognize that developing the software and serving about 20 million pages on this web site is very expensive. If you want to provide additional help, please consider contacting us to send a donation or provide other support. |