Our submission rules disqualify any trade secret information or confidential company documents. Since we only take published information, we don't believe there is any reason for a bounty hunter to engage in any improper activity. Instead, they will be focusing on the very positive activity of retrieving information that would otherwise be lost to the world that needs it most. Bounty hunters are required to give us the citation to the published information that they submit to us - the clear, public and unambiguous path to the information. Since the information is public, we have no reason to believe that our bounty hunters will obtain it illegally, but in any event we will be able to test whether there is a legitimate path to the information.
Posters also have to agree to the terms of the user agreement on the site.
The bounty will be awarded long before the patent is proved valid or invalid in a court. After the posting closes, the poster rates submissions, and we will pay the first matching submission as soon as we can arrange for payment. In other words, our bounties are paid based on matching the elements in the bounty posting, regardless of whether a patent is invalidated or not. We may change it based on the feedback we get from users, but we intend to focus on high-value information where bounties of that size and higher are prevalent. Like the minimum bounty, we expect to learn a great deal about the appropriate level of the posting fee in our first few months of operations.