Think a patent seems suspect? Put a bounty on its head at BountyQuest.

Look out Priceline.com, DoubleClick, and Cybergold: Someone is hunting your precious patents.

BountyQuest, a Web site that launched in October 2000, offers monetary rewards on behalf of bounty posters to anyone who can provide documentation that invalidates a standing patent. Think of it as a virtual wanted poster for bad intellectual property.

The site's founders, patent attorneys Charles Cella and Matt Vincent, see their service as a way to protect businesses and consumers from increasingly frequent litigation.

The idea sprang from Cella and Vincent's frustrations with the old methods of finding prior artââ,¬"documented evidence that an idea existed in the public domain before an invention or innovation was patented. They decided to tap the vast multitudes on the Web. "The best way to test the validity of these patents is to call on a community of scientists and engineers all over the world rather than a single patent examiner, judge, or single executive," BountyQuest CEO Cella says.

Payday

The gumshoes at BountyQuest pledge to bust intellectual property thieves. Just post your bounty, and wait for payday.

Bounty posters pay US$2,500 to post a bounty and $10,000 or more when a bounty hunter finds documentation that invalidates the patent in question. At press time, none of the 30 plus posted patents had been busted, lending credence to the contentions of attorney John Conklin of Leydig Voit and Mayer that proving the existence of prior art isn't easy and that the site's focus is too narrow. "I think there's certainly a need for this kind of thing," he says, "but I'd say a firm our sizeââ,¬"80 lawyers here, all patent lawyersââ,¬"wouldn't use this more than three or four times a year."

While bounties may benefit those businesses under threat of a patent lawsuit, Cella suggests that some attorneys and companies might use the site to prove the strength of their patents in a sort of prelitigation gauntlet. He also sees the potential for bounties from those who simply find a patent "unreasonable, overly broad, or improper."

One such posting is software book publisher Tim O'Reilly's bounty on Amazon.com's One-Click shopping patent, the topic of heated debate between O'Reilly and Amazon founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos since 1999. In a letter posted on his Web site, O'Reilly called Bezos's patent "a land grab, an attempt to hoodwink a patent system that has not gotten up to speed on the state of the art in computer science."

Seeing an opportunity to resolve this argument and bolster company credibility, BountyQuest lured these two industry leaders aboard.

As a result, Amazon is proudly an investor as well as a target of one of the first bounties on the site. "We believe in the validity of our patents," says Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith. "There are people who have raised questions about them, and they obviously should be heard."

But other companies targeted on the site seem less sanguine. Asked about the bounty on Priceline's reverse auction patent, one company representative refused to speculate upon the patent's validity, saying there was no need to discuss the matter.

"The true innovators should be excited to have their patents put to the test, because if it makes it through the challenge, it'll be viewed as stronger by everyone," says Cella about Priceline's reaction. "The only people who should really be upset about BountyQuest are those in the business of making money off mistakes on the part of the patent office."

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.