New article on peer-to-patent?

Photograph of a turkey buzzard. Bridgewater, New Jersey.

LBE was contacted by one Matthew Swibel of Forbes about peer-to-patent. Although LBE didn't get a chance to make comments, one suspects an article might be in the works.

Of Swibel, from American University [AU]:

Matthew Swibel is associate editor in the Washington bureau of Forbes magazine, where he has written about international business, personal finance and government regulation since 2002. For the past five years, he has served as a key contributor to the Forbes World Billionaires issue. In 2005, he was honored by the Overseas Press Club for his reporting from abroad. Swibel, an AU alumnus, previously wrote for the Washington Business Journal, where he earned awards from the MD-Del-DC Press Association and the Virginia Press Association. He is a frequent contributor to Rotarian magazine and member of the National Press Club.

LBE had written Inadvertent Argument Against Peer-to-Patent .

PatentHawk had a post on peer-to-patent entitled Turkey Vulture.

***
An article by Swibel is cited within United States Patent 7085745 (Swibel, Matthew, "Pay Up!," Forbes.com, Jul. 7, 2003. cited by other .)

Swibel wrote on KSR v. Teleflex:

A possibly better alternative, she says, "is to make it easier to strike down [a patent] in litigation." That’s what the big corporate patent holders are suggesting: Let a company that doesn't want to pay what it considers undue royalties win a patent challenge if it can show by "a preponderance of the evidence" that the invention was so obvious it should never have won a patent. In other words, make this area of the law more like other areas of civil litigation.

For its part, IBM wants to shift the burden-of-proof standard by asserting that the courts should presume an invention is obvious if it's used in a similar field and leave it to patent holders to prove that it wasn't obvious.

Of course, the standard of proof for invalidity was NOT at issue in KSR v. Teleflex and was NOT changed by the Supreme Court in KSR.

Maybe Swibel can look into The origins of low quality patents?, such as applications written by folks in India on behalf of U.S. companies.