whichever comes first), the average number of prior art submissions on Peer To Patent applications was 2,000 times that of standard rule-based submissions. 92% of patent examiners surveyed said they would welcome examining another application with public participation, while 73% of participating examiners want to see Peer-to-Patent implemented as a regular office practice. 21% of participating examiners stated that prior art submitted by the Peer To Patent community was "inaccessible" directly to USPTO examiners. Prior art submissions by Peer-to-Patent reviewers were four times as likely to include non-patent literature (any document that is not a patent, including Web sites, journals, textbooks, and databases) as compared to prior art submissions by applicants. Criticisms Criticism of the Peer to Patent project range from its goals to its likelihood of success to its unintended consequences. For instance, criticisms can be found in comments posted to two articles favorable to Peer To Patent on the well-known Patently Obvious (Patently-O) blog: articles about the announced launch and the actual launch of the pilot. Here is a sampling of objections aired in various forums: The patent system is too fundamentally out of kilter to be fixed by examining and rejecting individual patents. By reviewing patents that belong to categories some people think do not deserve patents (notably software), Peer To Patent implicitly endorses the existence of such patents. The problem with many bad patents does not involve the existence of prior art, but a definition by the patent office of "obviousness" that is too forgiving, and therefore allows obvious patents to be approved because they are not precisely the same as prior art. The participation process that works for free software and Wikipedia will not work for the patent system because it presents steep challenges of its own. Few people in the general public understand the unique use of language in patent applications or the stages through which an application passes. The current pilot has drawn masses of participants because of its novelty and because computer-related patents are a particularly contested policy area, but this is no guarantee that similar participation will be seen in other areas and over a long term. Potential infringers will be afraid to review patent applications because, if the patent is granted, the inventor could successfully argue in court that the infringer knew of the scope of the patent and therefore engaged in wilful infringement, potentially subjecting the infringer to triple