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."
