- When you're submitting a patent application you are required to have done a prior art search and list found prior art.

- law firms providing patent services often outsource prior art searches (more and more also to India etc)

- companies attacked with "Jules Verne patents" or overly broad patents often pay large amounts to find most relevant prior art

Suggestions:

(1) alloy users to put up bounties for finding prior art on existing / pending patents or for technology areas. I believe bounties should be starting with about $5K up to $100k+

(2) pay out those bounties based on a particular formula - e.g. when usable results top 5/ best answers get shares of the bounty pool - e.g. best answer 35%, 2nd 20%, 3rd 15%, 4th 10%, 5th 10%, 6th 10%

(3) Similar to bounties this could also be done via a sponsoring system