Wikipedia discussion with a former US patent examiner

First of all, I would like to thank Scott, a former US Patent and Trademark Office patent examiner, very much for commenting on my 25th Aug, 2006 blog entry “Wikipedia and U.S. Patent & Trademark Office” in great detail.

I don’t usually create a new blog entry in response to reader’s comment (which in-turn was a response to my initial WSJ Law blog comment) but I am making an exception here because I think my readers may be able to also learn something from Scott and the references he provided.

I mostly agree with Scott’s criticism of some of my statements. Therefore I would like to apologize to Scott for unwittingly mischaracterized what he meant. Not that I take any comfort in this, another reader, a lawyer, also managed to commit similar offense. (smile)

Now Scott said this in his comment on my blog, “As long the substance can be retrieved and its date of publication can be verified, and if the disclosure enables the claimed subject matter, it should be prior art. I understand that the “article history” tab for Wikipedia articles allows people to retrieve old versions of the article, so it would appear to meet these criteria.”

As I wrote in my new WSJ Law blog comment, which I will repeat here,

“Now, onto the issue of “date-verifiable information”. True, Wikipedia has time-stamps of when entries are being updated or modified. But these time-stamps are not temper proof that will test the scrutiny of computer security experts in court. A temper proof computer file system that is date-verifiable probably need to sit on top of some digital signature system. (I think New York Times and some other large newspaper used to and probably still have some people paying them to print some digitally signed digest. The idea is that some high-valued information is “certified” to be like this [like taking a snapshot] at a certain moment in time. After all, the digital digest is printed on paper on that particular day and any subsequent tempering can be red-flagged.) Now, the amount of computing power and resources need to securely digitally sign the whole Wikipedia is left as an interesting exercise for the readers. (smile)”

It is sad but I suppose a matter of economics and human resources that, “Examiners are given about a day’s time to search the world of information to determine whether something was done before.”
As a side note, I may soon trying to learn more about the Chinese patent system/law which will be a totally different ball game but hopefully fruitful at the same time.