262ventures.com

My buddies Kyle and Joel just launched PRIORsmART yesterday. It’s a new meta patent search site that allows you to search the patent databases from a bunch of different countries. I’ve been using it for a couple months now and it’s been super helpful in my own work. They’ve made it available in many different languages for ease of use.

My take on it is that this could be a great equalizer for inventors all over the world and a potential catalyst for innovation. In an ideal world, making it easier to know what prior art exists across the world, should prevent, proverbially, ‘the reinvention of the wheel.’ For example, there are probably tons of interesting inventions buried in the Swedish patent office. But because I can’t read Swedish, I won’t even bother to look. Priorsmart helps eliminate language hurdles to performing an exhaustive search.

Some may argue that a site like this allows for easier patent infringement as access to this information becomes frictionless [i.e. fewer language barriers]. I would argue that inventors examine existing patents mostly to see how they can work around the claims. This generally can lead to the development of radically new things, generating the potential for innovation. Most of the time, novel designs arise because prior art can not address all of the needs.

Techcrunch blogged about it today.

Tags: patents, priorsmart

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Technology, patents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.