The Peer-to-Patent project, spearheaded by Beth Noveck in her law professor days before she became Deputy U.S. CTO for open government, often gets talked about as one of the more successful examples of how citizens can be invited in to do the actual work of governing. Alas, from now on, it will have to be talked about in the past tense. The U.S. Patent Office has chosen not to renew the project. Peer-to-Patent has fallen victim, says its leaders, to the country's troubled economic situation. From their just-released second anniversary report:

As we conclude Year Two of the Peer-to-Patent project I am reminded of the opening line of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” By almost every conceivable measure Peer-to-Patent has met or exceeded the goals established at its outset. Yet, due to the broad economic downturn of the past year we find that we are unable to continue the Peer-to-Patent project at this time. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has placed a moratorium on extending the pilot beyond June 2009 until they can complete a full evaluation of the impact Peer-to-Patent has had on the quality of the examination process. Those who have expended so much money, time, and energy to make Peer-to-Patent what it is remain hopeful that the program will be renewed in the near future, either as an extended pilot or a standard part of USPTO practice.

The report is chock full of details of how the experiment in fixing the patent mess through citizen-expert engagement worked over the course of its two-year run. Read the full thing here.

UPDATE: Mark Webbink, Executive Director of the Center for Patent Innovations at New York Law School, writes in to say that while the Patent Office has chosen not to renew the project, it technically soldiers on while several dozen patents are still under consideration. From peertopatent.org: "The USPTO has closed the Peer-to-Patent pilot and is no longer accepting new applications. Applications already in the system will continue to be processed."

The White House has made an intriguing pick with nominating David Kappos to head up the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Kappos is well-known in the patent world as both a patent reformer in general and, from his position inside IBM, one of the driving forces behind Peer-to-Patent project in particular. Peer -to-Patent is the attempt to apply principles of collaboration and community review to solving USPTO's resource allocation problem. There are too many patents applications awaiting review, and many of them are enormously complicated. There are too few patent examiners and they, through no real fault of their own, don't have access to the knowledge necessary to make sense of the applications in the time they have available to do so. It's kind of a hot mess. That's where Peer-to-Patent comes in...

National Journal's Andrew Noyes has an interesting piece about patent reform that's, alas, behind a pay wall. No worries, though. I'll tell you what's in it. The backdrop is that a fairly major piece of patent rights reform legislation is wending its way through Congress, and the debate can get heated. Should patent rights go to the first documented inventor of a product -- which is how things work now -- or simply the first to get their paperwork in to USPTO? Should there be a cap on the damages that a court can award for patent violations? And would doing so encourage innovation, or do the exact opposite and stymie it? Complicated stuff.

But what's particularly interesting for us here is that U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra was named at Friday's hearing before the House Science Committee as a White House point person responsible for determining the Obama Administration's stance on patent reform. That's noteworthy. Why? Because placing Chopra in the midst of a complex legislative battle points to a policy-oriented, instrumental role in crafting the U.S. approach to technological innovation. Even parsing Obama Administration statements, it's never been exactly clear what the nature of Chopra's post would be. Reading the tea leaves a bit, this development points to a U.S. CTO with a significant and potentially powerful portfolio. (Photo by cytech)