You can help catch a criminal, and as law enforcement officials know, success is often the product of the right person being at the right place at the right time. A new company is poised to take advantage of people being in the right place at the right time for the defense or invalidation of patents. Although the formation of the company is interesting, the fact that it is needed illustrates the shortcomings of the U.S. patent system. The need BountyQuest was born out of necessity. New kinds of property that have been introduced in the past few decades, including computer software, biotechnology, and business processes, have raised alarms from critics that bad patents are being approved because the patent system is inexperienced in these new areas.
Prior art is like a list of hangouts, former addresses, and friends of Wild West outlaws.
It tells you a little of their history and where you might currently find them. Prior art is the patent system's term for published information about the technique or technology on which the invention that is being examined for patentability is based. Often, this information is included in a patent application, because inventors are required to provide any prior art that they know about. The patent examiner has a limited amount of time to search this and other sources of prior information to see whether anything can and should be patented. Prior art searches, first conducted by the inventor or the inventor's law firm and then repeated under time constraints by patent examiners, are time-consuming and difficult on traditional cases.