When the Patent and Trademark Office announced this summer that it would expand its Peer Review Pilot program, some of the biggest cheers came from companies that would seem, on first glance, to be the pilot’s biggest losers. The program is a Web-based experiment, in the spirit of Wikipedia and MySpace, intended to let anyone with time and an Internet connection submit prior art that could knock out an application in the eyes of a PTO examiner. Among the corporate losers: Hewlett-Packard Co., which filed 14 patent applications under the voluntary program, only to see two of its first three preliminarily rejected. Yet HP plans to keep filing. Getting a no-go, it says, and getting it quickly, is part of the plan.
“The last thing we want to do is litigate a patent we shouldn’t have gotten in the first place,” says Curtis Rose, director of patents at HP. It’s a sentiment that other pilot participantswhich include General Electric Co., Red Hat, Inc., IBM Corp., and Microsoft Corp.share. Getting rejected via peer review, they say, means that the prior art was out there somewhere. Better that it turns up before a company has built products, markets, and licensing programs around the patent.
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