There is pretty widespread agreement that the patent examination system is broken - too many meaningless patents that then are used by trolls for purposes of blackmail. In addition to public efforts to improve the existing system, there are private efforts. Among the most notable is wikipatents, a "wikipedia" like effort to provide community review of patents. Particularly with respect to prior art, where the patent office has not proved particularly knowledgeable, this potentially can lead to a significant improvement in the awarding of patents by providing greater transparency and informational input to the system. Go check it out.

The idea is great. However:

1. What would make someone fill in those forms? It can't be just anyone, it has to be an expert. And experts are rare. And they usually don't have much time. In order to make a comparison, I don't think that most people that contribute to WikiPedia are real experts; I could write many of those articles after some careful googling. I mean, Wikipedia is a high-quality encyclopedia, but encyclopedia articles are not as deep as very specific technologies. The questions asked at Wiki Patents are quite hard. I might say that even an expert has to guess some of the answers... like "what's the expected market-share that this invention is going to capture?".

I would expect competing companies (or companies that wish to compete someday) to put their experts to work on this, clearing their company's way of trivial patents, for example. I even think that this alone might be enough to generate useful (for the patent office) and high-quality comments. But then, experts from a competing company could have some incentive not to report their true opinions. For example, it would be great for the company if all the experts dismissed the competitor's patent as "trivial". Note that I am talking about only one question... The website asks lots of questions. Imagine if people start to use this information to assess the price of companies shares... The incentives to lie in the specific question I mentioned about future market-share would be pretty high, I think.

2. If this is to work, it has to be well publicized. Marketing is something that many people with great ideas just can't get right. It *is* crucial.