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.
