The Peer to Patent Project: Community Patent Review was always a dumb idea. Note that no drug companies, the guys who really know how to ply patents, would touch the project with a barge pole. Now the participants are figuring that out.

In absence of legal blowback, contributing companies would encourage their employees, in their spare time, of course, to police patent applications, so as to help the hapless patent office weed out all those junk patents from independent inventors that are clogging up the works so that those shiny ideas from major corporations have to wait to become patents.

But, well, gee, if your engineer employee tries to trash a patent application, but it becomes a patent anyway, and your company infringes the patent, probably from development by the same engineering group that the attempted trashing came from, it's going to be mighty hard to maintain "plausible deniability" that you didn't knowingly, i.e., willfully, infringe. That's an invitation for the patent holder to seek treble damages. BusinessWeek, in one of its typically garbled articles of misinformation, "Infringement fears haunt patent project", quotes Marc Williams of IBM, that the realization is creating "a lot of fear."

Beth Noveck, the Community Patent Review director, toots, with considerable self interest: "pooh." Deliberate infringement applies to patents, not applications, she retorts. Tell it to the judge, Beth.

As Peter Zura points out in "Litigation Issues Spook Community Patent Review":

Under 35 U.S.C. § 154(d), a patent owner can obtain a reasonable royalty from any infringer from the date the patent application is published, to the date the patent issues. The catch here is that, before you can claim provisional patent rights, the potential infringer must (1) receive actual notice of the publication, (2) the patent must issue, and (3) the issued claims must be substantially identical to the published claims.

Even if a patent holder doesn't meet § 154(d) for that "bonus time" infringement, triple willful bonus damages are still on the table.

Here's an idea, safe as milk - let the patent office examine patents. Because of all the brouhaha about junk patents in the past few years, precisely from the same clown outfits that are now sponsoring Community Patent Review, the patent office, ever politically sensitive, has tightened up; allowance is down. By sheer percentage, the USPTO spewing junk is past. If the patent office lets a few bad apples fall from the tree, hire a professional patent killer to build an invalidity position for you. Try Patent Hawk. He regularly whacks patents from major and minor corporations, as well the occasional bad seed from a penny-ante inventor. You wouldn't believe the junk patents that major corporations have pushed through the patent office in years past...

If you want to play Patent Hawk, try Wiki Patents; Wiki at least has a fun site.