Puffery on peer-to-patent? Drew Carey to head USPTO?

Andrew Schrock has a puff piece ("Opening Up the Patent Process") on peer-to-patent in the MIT Technology Review. The piece includes the text: harness the power of online collaboration to streamline patent review. Sounds like a tv game show in the making; Drew Carey as director of the USPTO?

See also:

Inadvertent Argument Against Peer-to-Patent

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/09/another-reason-why-peer-to-patent-is.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/07/peer-to-patent-preliminary-boxscore.html

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/07/peer-to-patent-1078-reviewers-produced.html

On a separate, but related point, note a thread at the New York Times on patent reform, which begins with the opposition of the IEEE to the current bill [HR 1908]:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/30/engineers-fight-patent-reform-not-patent-trolls/

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IPBiz wanted to make a comment at the technologyreview website (my.technologyreview.com) but a detailed registration process is required (Ironically, one of the commenters TO the Schrock piece complained about navigating the USPTO website!!).

Anyway, Schrock wrote:

Amazon's 1-Click patent describes how a single button press by a customer performs an immediate online purchase. It was granted in 1999, but Peter Calveley's grassroots campaign in 2006 led to a post-grant examination. He publicly criticized the patent in his blog and collected donations online to pay for the reexamination fee. The prior art and previous patents he uncovered proved to the patent examiners that, rather than being innovative, 1-Click described a common way for online retailers to conduct business using established technologies. Calveley's case demonstrates the drawbacks of the USPTO system: an unworthy patent nearly made it through the vetting process because the examiner didn't have access to prior art and enough technical knowledge to make the correct determination.

For those interested in what REALLY has happened, a re-examination was granted on US Patent 5,960,411, and the most recent event in that re-examination (90/007,946) was the filing of a supplemental IDS by Rajiv Patel of Fenwick & West on 5 September 2007. There has been NO Office Action in the re-examination, so that one may really question the accuracy of Schrock's statement: The prior art and previous patents he uncovered proved to the patent examiners that, rather than being innovative, 1-Click described a common way for online retailers to conduct business using established technologies. This is just one more example illustrating that those advocating peer-to-patent are totally clueless on what is happening at the USPTO. They don't understand how a re-examination works. Noveck has illustrated that she does not understand the concept of prior art, as detailed in Inadvertent Argument Against Peer-to-Patent.

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Separately, see an entry on the igdmlgd blog.

****UPDATE

IPBiz got a mention in Patent Baristas: Should Peer-To-Patent Review Be Made Compulsory? [Posted October 1st, 2007 by Stephen Albainy-Jenei]