> The America Invents Act changed the law to allow the public to submit examples of prior art while a patent application is being examined. And that’s why the USPTO asked us to set up Ask Patents, a Stack Exchange site where software developers like you can submit examples of prior art to stop crappy software patents even before they’re issued.
Yes, they did. They asked a lot of folks to do a lot of things. That does not mean it is actually used.
I've talked with the ask patents folks before, and from what i remember, they send email to the examiners. That's it.
They try to occasionally look and see if the stuff they cite was cited by the examiners, but then they assume that if that is the case, that they were the reason the examiner found it. While I understand how hard it is to know why examiners did things in general (You can see exactly what they searched for through PAIR data, but not what results it turned up), this is a very very suspect methodology.
People really need to stop always quoting Joel - he is not a definitive go-to software spokesperson, and has some very strong (and often wrong) opinions about things -- shaped by years at Microsoft doing things only the Microsoft way.
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He is puffing his product in this blog post -- nothing more.
He's stating facts about his startup. It's not like he's giving some opinion on something he's not qualified for. It's like saying we shouldn't ask Woz we he made Apple Basic.
patents.stackexchange is probably not the end source for them to base a decision on, but rather a place to find real sources of prior art for patent applications. So it seems very likely to me.
Patent examiners are generally not allowed to search external sources for information about unpublished apps. I've had this discussion numerous times with examiners and PTO officials while working on improving prior art finding on google.com/patents.
They have a very fixed number of sources they search, and are generally not allowed to search elsewhere with unpublished app info.
So I can pretty much 100% guarantee you they are not searching patents.stackexchange for information.
(Plus, patents.stackexchange themselves do not suggest examiners use it that way. They email examiners).
For published apps (this was recently published), they are allowed to do more, but they generally don't anyway. They stick to the databases/etc that are available to them internally.
"Ask Patents" has been used by the USPTO to overturn patent requests.
http://patents.stackexchange.com/