Is there a website for sharing patent analysis together with prior art claim charts for fending off trolls?

Question

A lot of work goes into constructing claim charts, analyzing patents, but this is done all over again in each patent litigation case. It would be great to share patent analysis data to bring down litigation costs to fight back patent trolls easier. That would help industry a lot. Usually even competing companies unite in fighting patent trolls. Prior art claim chart comparing against troll patents would be a great help if that would be accessible to masses.

Is there a place to find and share such documents? Is there a way to do it here?

Answer 1

I believe only this site covers this, through the prior-art-request mechanism. This would be the case even if it is answered by the question asker. Although prior art requests were intended for use for pre-grant applications, the same analysis applies whether pre-grant or post-grant.

A validity analysis can be displayed using an answer (though not in a table, since Stack Exchange doesn't support them). For example:

Claim 1

1. An apparatus, comprising:

Shown in '789 at para 4.

a first widget; and

Shown in '789 at para 6.

a second widget.

Shown in '789 at Fig 1.

Therefore claim 1 is not novel over '789.

As an aside, a claim chart is a small part of an approach for analysing the validity of a claim, and really only works when considering novelty. It never really stands alone, since it requires a lot of further textual discussion to provide a full validity analysis. A claim chart alone would likely not assist someone who is being sued by a patent holder.

Answer 2

There are many reasons why people shouldn't share such information:

• Company A won't be interested in what company B has to say unless they operate in the same industry, i.e. they are competitors.

• The cost of each patent analysis is high, so companies will likely do analysis only if needed, which would include defenses against infringement claims.

• Anything you say can, and will be, used against you. This is why in patent application you should avoid discussing other patents because such discussion could be taken as admission.

You don't want your competitor to anticipate what you might say in your effort to invalidate their patent or defend yourself against infringement claim. Participation in public disclosure would be a messy and costly business because then you need to get attorneys involved in determining the risk of your disclosure.

Another problem is that patent law is a moving target. Every now and then the courts would have opinions that have far reaching impact on how patents are filed and interpreted. In other words, analysis done right now probably becomes out-of-date in a few years.

Still another problem is that you don't know which patents are important. Many questions posted here are related to patent applications that are abandoned. Analysis could become a waste of time when the patent/patent application in question get abandoned.

Answer 3

You may find it helpful in such analysis, to have a persistent identifier for documents and collections that allows full reuse and no privacy compromises. The Lens has been working at this for many years as an open, digital public good, and has developed an open public, persistent LensID for patent documents, including applications. These can be annotated, shared (or not) as any user wishes, with no one - including Google or Google Analytics - knowing or sharing who users are or what they're doing.

FYI for prior art considerations and to help in claims analysis (especially novelty and non-obviousness/inventive step), Lens has extracted almost 30M non-patent citations and matched them to DOIs and PMIDs (persistent identifiers) and allows exploration of this art. Here's an example from one of my old (lapsed) patents.