In Global Online Effort To Ascertain Validity of Patents, Eric Sinrod notes the effort of startup Article One Partners to improve the quality of issued patents. (See also Online startup aims to improve patent quality.) The company seeks to do this by offering substantial payments to people who submit relevant prior art that helps to determine whether a given patent is valid or not. The resulting prior art can help to show a patent is invalid--or enhance the validity of others. Now I'm suspicious of the idea of trying to "legitimize the validity of patents"--but this is probably just PR. I suspect that on balance more patents will be sunk than strengthened by this type of crowdsourcing. Sunshine makes a good disinfectant!