This is a great effort. I help companies defend themselves from lawsuits involving nonsense patents regarding the stuff that I happen to know a bit about. One thing that might be done to help concentrate the effort where it has the most effect is to find out about the actual lawsuits filed by the trolls and then to prioritize those.

It's great to go after all patents filed by some troll, and that needs doing, but for the parties that are being sued by trolls specific action on specific patents would be far more beneficial.

Most of the patents litigated today were filed quite a while ago and if we don't concentrate on finding the prior art that might help a party sued under those particular patents it might well get lost. So concentrate on the patents that are actively litigated first, then concentrate on the patents that can still be easily squashed and then work from the oldest to the newest.

I realize that's a tall order but this is imo the best way to prioritize this kind of work. The main reason for the prioritization like this is that patents are filed in a system that does not forget, prior art is not filed in a central place and even stuff that happened less than two decades ago can be almost impossible to locate any proof of that will stand up in court. So older stuff should get priority.

Incidentally, Joao Controls is still on the warpath with their bogus live video patents.

Great idea. Also fwiw, kudos to Peer2Patent and AskPatents. Good to see more sites like this, organizing the world to fight trolls.

[1]:http://www.peertopatent.org/

[2]:http://patents.stackexchange.com/

Also http://www.bluepatent.com/en

Thanks, we hope build strong community in the whole eco-system to fight trolls/bad-patent.

Hi James, ff 29 hides the quest list button on the top right when you try to click on it so nothing happens.

The same on other pages with the menu on the left, clicking it does not work. Typo: 'all quest[s]' 'my quest[s]' 'All payments will be sent directly to the PayPal account that we will fu[r]ther inquire' (in fact that whole sentence doesn't parse)

Hi jacquesm, what is "ff29"? Yeah These feature we're still working that, should be working soon:) Wow I should check those words spelling...thank you!!!!

You're welcome, ff 29 -> FireFox 29

Being able to right click and open different offerings in new tabs would make me much more likely to look around. Needing to click on one, and then back out and select the next slows down my workflow and makes me more likely to give up and move on to another similar site.

I really like the idea of the rewards though. Someone willing to spend some time on the research could stay in business with this.

The fact that quests from all over the world are collected and placed at one place makes it easier (not to mention, a lot more interesting) for prior art treasure hunters like me to participate in.

Here's the real question though: does knowing that there exists prior art to a certain patent in question at all change the need to go through a painfully lengthy and exorbitantly expensive legal process to prove that one's innocent?

Or does this still require a company to be as well capitalized as Newegg in order to be able to withstand a patent attack, and thus doesn't really matter for the majority of us?

When a patent application is in its larval stage, 6 months after initial publication, at least in the US it can be murdered by prior art submitted by anyone, online, for free. A number of open source hardware and software communities I try to keep up with are now under direct threat of patents, and a centralized place where we could get a simple listing of patent app link, time until vulnerability period is over, and possibly a forum to discuss possible directions of prior art and coordinate submission would be extremely helpful. That way, it's possible to eradicate the assheaded attempts to restrict ideas before they become enforceable by law.

For an already issued patent, I understand it's worth trying to put the trial on hold while it gets re-examined. A reexamination is generally much cheaper than a patent trial.

In the AIA 2011, there are some new post-grant opposition procedure that speeds up and reduce the legal cost such as PGR, IPR, CBM. Although opposition application is about $30k USD plus some paper work. This is not super cheap, but it is still a lot cheaper than going through discovery and superstar trial lawyers by litigating, which would be in the millions $$.

The problem here is that the parties that are going to get hit with those patents probably don't even exist yet. Your typical patent troll buys patents that have value, the filing was done in bulk in the past, then by the time the state of the art has progressed for a bit (much more than half a year) they look over their portfolio and decide which patents can be harvested.

Some patents trolls will buy up selected patents that have been filed by others.

So the opposition applications will likely not be done because you'd have to oppose a whole ton of patents more or less on principle without knowing whether or not those patents would ever be used to litigate.

The patent office should get better at doing its job and should not simply approve the vast majority of what goes past their desks without doing actual work, and should make the filer pay a stiff fine if they miss disclosing prior art should the patent be refused or overturned.

Not that that is ever going to happen, but the current system favours the applicant way too much.

Although courts/ITC might not grant a stay depending on IPR, CBM etc., there have been some cases if the litigation hasnt gone too far, a stay could/have been granted in some of cases. Would this tip the scales towards the defendant slightly, given that the specific patents would be known?

Even with dead on prior art, you're still out of pocket $500k to $1.5 million in legal fees before you can kill the patent in court, which is why cost-of-litigation settlements are common. Newer procedures (begun last year) are killing patents at the USPTO with a high success rate for in the range of $100k to 300k.

hi josaka, yeh i think the new procedures (IPR, CBM) relatively increases prior art research emphasis. Do you think high success rate has a pre-selected bias? i.e. stakeholders only apply higher confidence oppositions to the USPTO?

Community based (even ones centered around IP..not necessarily geographically based) things always fascinate me and get me giddy. Plus...the idea is brilliant. It might not cater to the general public (like quirky does) but that's ok. Doesn't need to . It caters to those people with a love of data and understanding and want to be apart of something (and maybe make some $$).

nice concept :) btw the scrollbar on chrome (current/35.0.1916.114m) is missing 0_o

To Life360:(If you see this) Dear sir, we are here to help you. We understand how painful it is, and we believe that "Mr. Piece of Sh*t" should striped off all his bogus patents. We leverage expert crowd(2000+,growing) from all around the world to find "bugs" in Mr. Malcom Beyer's patents.

Let’s help Life360 fight back. http://venturebeat.com/2014/05/23/patent-trolls-have-come-af...

I don't get it - why does the page keep calling me Bob?

That made me a bit paranoid at first, since my name is Robert.

Sorry man. Maybe I should fix this later, Bob.

(Ok Robert I will fix this I promise)

There are a few issues with your signup that stopped me from signing up:

- Signup with Facebook is broken (invalid url?) - Private is spelled "privite" (incorrect) - Submitting a signup form missing one input causes it to clear out. - There is no clear indication that fields are mandatory. I guessed that you didn't need my school/job, but it looks like it was necessary. - Why do you need my school/job? - Dropdown boxes cannot be tabbed-between (tab button doesn't work) - When I move my mouse inputs move too.

Sorry we will fix the Facebook login, typo ASAP.

User background help us curate all the submissions more effectively.

All user information will be kept private, and used internally for submission curation only.

You don't have to do that, I read your other comment about 'Bob' being a common placeholder. Therefore I decided to gooooooooooooooooooooooooogle it [0].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob

Cuz our company is called "MobiusBobs" Bob is the most commonly used placeholder name in CS...

It would help if you have a short synopsis of what this is - for example if I want to share with others (like an about page). And if I could copy the text, it seems it is coded in a way that text isn't copyable which is lame (in my opinion).

These mistakes are not uncommon. I often get the feeling in those cases that such pedestrian concerns are beneath the coolness of what we are doing. That is the impression I get (even if it is wrong). It feels to me like the Flash enthusiasts 10+ years ago, for example, making lots of restaurant sites that were highly unusable but looked pretty.

I think, making it very easy for people to share info about worthwhile efforts is a good idea.

I do really hope you all can make this a success. It seems to me to be a potentially very worthwhile effort.

>It feels to me like the Flash enthusiasts 10+ years ago, for example, making lots of restaurant sites that were highly unusable but looked pretty

IMO we've come full circle back to this "form over function" with every site requiring multiple js libraries.

Whatever happened to good ol' static html with some CSS?

Thanks for the encouragement and feedback, we will try to update our site to make it more easily sharable.

needs a spell check though, there's quite a bit of copy that has spelling or grammar mistakes, or missing words.

Patent hackers, huh? I think I like it.

There are plenty of bugs in a patent. Each patent examiner only has 10-20 to "examine" a patent application, many bad and "dangerous" patents get granted. I think using a hacker's approach can weed out bad patents like bugs!!