The New York Law School Chapter of UAEM is proud to announce that it is now an officially recognized student organization at New York Law School.

Because we are an independent law school, UAEM-NYLS will function as somewhat of an anomaly in the UAEM system. But we have something important to offer UAEM even if we don’t have a Technology Transfer Office…

NYLS is home to the Institute for Information Policy and Law, which recently developed a patent reform initiative called Community Patent Review. The aim of this initiative is to improve the quality of issued patents by giving patent examiners access to better information during the review process. The current system in America is buried under a backlog of close to a million patent applications. Patent examiners do not have access to the best information to make a determination about patentability. The backlog, combined with an inadequate number of skilled examiners working under unreasonable time constraints and with too little information, has resulted in a plethora of both non-meritorious and overly broad patents being granted. These “low-quality” patents can harm downstream research and innovation, becoming another obstacle in the fight for access to medicines.

Under Community Patent Review, patent applications are posted online and experts, invited from the public at large (called “peer reviewers”) are encouraged to take part in the patent application review process. Peer reviewers submit prior art, comment on the patent or on specific prior art submissions. In order to ensure that the submissions are useful and relevant, peer reviewers rate claims, rate prior art submissions, and rate other peer reviewers. The system then transmits the best prior art to the US Patent and Trademark Office for consideration by the patent examiner in making her decision to grant a patent. The idea is that better information leads to better decision-making.

The best news in all of this is that the USPTO has agreed to pilot the program this coming spring and it is already backed by major companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Hewlett Packard. While the scope of the pilot will be limited to software patents, the hope is that the program will work well enough that the USPTO will expand it into other fields. In anticipation of this, Professor Beth Noveck, Community Patent Review’s creator and advisor to our UAEM chapter, is already collaborating on a second proposal to demand that the NIH mandate open peer review for all NIH-funded university research patents as a prerequisite to receiving funding. The new proposal also calls for peer reviewers of NIH grants to participate in reviewing patents.

Clearly this is a step in the right direction.

While the system may sound somewhat myopic in this brief of a description, I believe that Community Patent Review will provide some interesting opportunities for UAEM and the access to medicines campaign in general. At this very early stage, the bulk of our work here at the NYLS chapter will be aimed at researching exactly how our community patent initiative can intersect with the goals and mission of UAEM.

We invite other UAEMM members as well as the public at large to send us suggestions, questions, comments, or ideas on what Community Patent Review can do for UAEM. I would also like to invite the greater UAEM community to feel free to utilize the NYLS chapter as a resource for any general legal queries.

For more information, please contact me at cwong05 [at] nyls.edu.

For further information on the community patent initiative, go to
http://dotank.nyls.edu/communitypatent

-Chris Wong
UAEM-NYLS