Ask HN: Please critique my crowd-sourced patent debunking business concept | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please critique my crowd-sourced patent debunking business concept

4 pointsDE4DBEEF5 comments

Hello folks,

I briefly wanted to run this concept by you to see what you think of it. I would greatly appreciate comments/critiques/anything else that comes to mind. Thank you very much!

Concept: It's a social game where you and your friends band together to solve tasks. A law firm somewhere wants some digging done regarding a patent they are working on invalidating through prior art, and they'd like a big blob of people to look around the Internet and see if they can find something compromising. As a team, you pick one of these tasks and start looking around for prior art regarding this patent you're trying to invalidate.

As a player, you pick the role of either a finder or a grader. As a finder you look around the net for information on the target patent and submit links to that info. A grader's job is to rate the submitted data from other teams: you filter out spam, you give low grades to data that's obvious and trivial (like the first results on Google) and give good marks to data that you feel is extremely important to the case. Teams with the highest scores are rewarded monetarily with portion of the sponsorship money for a job well done.

The idea is two wrap the underlying mechanics into a social game shell, analogous to, for example, Travian/Planetarion/MafiaWars. Why? Because ideally an average Joe with no expertise in IP law could play this game, and so through sheer numbers the data could beat in value what other companies are doing, who rely on domain experts to perform the searches.

You compete with other teams to get as much quality data as you can within the given amount of time. At the end, this filtered data is sent over to the company sponsoring the search and they use it to supplement their case for debunking the patent. (This is the business plan part of the concept) Additionally, and this isn't very fleshed out yet, as part of the player experience, you learn more about how IP law works, you trade information with other teams and you solve quizzes for points.

So, what do you guys think, is this something you'd actually participate to as a player? Does this sound fun? Any big gaps?

Thanks again!

It can work but both finders and graders would definitely need to get some reasonable education beforehand. Something like a code academy/treehouse of IP would be the go. Also, the amount of time it would take/amount each gamer would need to or be willing to commit to get decent results would be interesting. Back at uni in an "business model/startup" course, we had to complete an assignment essentially doing what your suggesting. We had had 6-8hrs of prior classes and a fair bit of course reading (at least 4hrs if you did all). We all got a brief for the technology we had to investigate which was an device for completing eye surgery surgery! Everyone found at least 10+ patents that could have been seen as prior art as there was competitors in that space (some of which was found by others, some of which was totally misunderstood and crap) - In the end, no one found anything new that would have impacted the new tech and our lecturer (a VC) was very happy with the additional free research! He went on to use those who got the best grades for some paid work - a good way to outsource any initial research his firm had to do on potential investments

For this to be successful, one should be able to easily explain the the patent idea to the game players.

When I filed my first patent, I had to sit with my patent attorney (who had a PhD in Computer Science) for more than an hour to explain the core idea. And I don't think this is a corner case - most of the patents that are filed are quite complex.

If you can address this issue, what you are proposing can be big.

"is this something you'd actually participate to as a player? Does this sound fun?"

Yes, and yes!

However, I really hope you have a solid grasp of the IP laws in different locales, and what "prior art" means in those locales. I don't and I suspect many HNers don't either. For instance, I often read on HN that the iPad isn't innovative, because it resembles the PADD communicator from Star Trek, calling that "prior art". I don't know, maybe it is. Maybe I can design a flying saucer, and I won't be able to patent it because hundreds of Sci-Fi movies provide prior art.

I think Article One Partners (http://www.articleonepartners.com/) is already doing this if I'm not wrong (minus the social game aspect). Do explore their website. Even non-patent professionals have nailed a lot of patent invalidations over the last few years.

I'm aware of them actually, thanks for the pointer. They indeed would be the main competitors in the market as of today! They're pretty much doing what BountyQuest did back in the early 2000s.

The difference between what I proposed and AOP is that it'd be targeted more towards the masses than domain experts and it'd have a game-like wrapper with leader-boards and other gamification-style incentives.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com