A href="http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=33d934c165e69e4b507504c2b&id=8771dc3ae5&e=77c352ede8#mctoc1">report
from the Peer to Patent initiative shows
that the project is having salutary effects on the patent system.
Besides the greater openness that Peer to Patent promotes in
evaluating individual patent applications, it is creating a new
transparency and understanding of the functioning of the patent system
as a whole. I'll give some background to help readers understand the
significance of Manny Schecter's newsletter item, which concerns prior
art that exists outside of patents. I'll add my own comments about
software patents.

Let's remind ourselves of the basic rule of patenting: no one should
get a patent for something that was done before by someone else. Even
if …

An unusual href="http://www.meetup.com/Distributed-Work/calendar/13300733/">Distributed
Distributed Work Meetup was held last night in four different
cities simultaneously, arranged through many hours of hard work by href="http://www.meetup.com/Distributed-Work/members/9584137/">Lukas
Biewald and his colleagues at distributed work provider href="http://crowdflower.com/">CrowdFlower.

With all the sharing of experiences and the on-the-spot analyses
taking place, I didn't find an occasion to ask my most pressing
question, so I'll put it here and ask my readers for comments:

How can you set up crowdsourcing where most people work for free but
some are paid, and present it to participants in a way that makes it
seem fair?

This situation arises all the time, with paid participants such as
application developers and community …