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I see Article One Partners has a research study for US5491834. Why would anyone post prior art at Ask Patents for granted patents?

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Are you asking why would someone do something for no reward when they could do the same thing for a reward? – George White Mar 12 at 20:40
Yes. I may be missing the point of the prior art tag on askPatents. – user1342 Mar 12 at 21:11
I think the driving force behind this was to engage a software knowledgeable audience to collectively identify documents that might be good prior art to be submitted in pending cases under the AIA 3rd party submittal procedure. However it is not the sole purpose of the site and people may want to identify and tag things that might be used to invalidate issued patents.Presumably someone involved in a suit might stumble across something useful here. – George White Mar 12 at 21:18
Since this is largely about the purpose and operation of the site, I am going to move this to meta. – Robert Cartaino♦ Mar 13 at 17:15
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A lot of people are genuinely eager to help improve this system for nothing (or because they think doing so is good for them or their industry.) Most patents aren't on Article One, and my understanding is that (as you reference) there are none there pre-issue. So if you want to help improve the quality of most patents, especially before too-broad patents get issued, they're not really an option. Not to turn the question around, but why would anyone post a bounty there without first trying to solicit help for free here. – Jaydles♦ Mar 18 at 20:40

migrated from patents.stackexchange.com Mar 13 at 17:15

1 Answer

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This site is not about pre-issuance searches. See the others questions on the topic. It is only concerned with invalidating issued patents. You have a legitimate point, why give away a free search? Probably explains the utter dearth of responses to calls for prior art. Most appear to be nothing than so someone using google patent's prior art feature.

The concept that the site makes the examination process better means it has to deal with pre-issuance inventions. That takes away from work though for people who want to get paid to file bad applications.

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To the contrary, this site was created originally to solicit prior art for published but not yet examined US applications. The provisions of the AIA provide a window for free 3rd party submissions. See FAQs – George White Mar 19 at 4:16

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