Article One Partners Patent Review

About a year and half ago I wrote an article about a new organization called PeerToPatent , dedicated to reviewing patent applications for prior art in the software industry to help improve the quality if patents.  This site opened up patent applications to review by its user community to discover prior art.  The advantage of the patent applicant was that the U.S. Patent office would move their application to the front of the queue.  I saw an article recently about a new startup company with a similar mission, except they have a business model to make money.  The company is called Article One Partners, and they allow registered users to provide prior art information regarding existing patents.  The community feedback can be valuable in invalidating frivolous patents or strengthening good patents.  They actually have a system in place to pay the registered members who provide the research, and their business model is to sell the information to interested companies.  I don't know if Article One Partners is affiliated directly with PeerToPatent, but they do have the PeerToPatent web site link on their site.  I think both these initiatives apply some of the principles of the wisdom of crowds to help improve the quality of patents.  Low quality patents stifle innovation, increase litigation, and waste resources, and if the system cannot reduce the number of trivial patents, it will eventually collapse.  This will not be good for innovation either, because there will be no protection for legitimate innovation.