Amazon's involvement in BountyQuest proved to be a double-edged sword. First, the award-winning prior art submission invalidating InTouch's downloading patents raised eyebrows. Then, when BountyQuest announced that no prior art had been discovered undermining the one-click patent, others began to wonder.

Today Cella and O'Reilly dismiss the supposed scandal as an aberration and a distraction. "This is completely ridiculous," says O'Reilly, addressing the one-click patent issue. "Amazon had nothing to do with the judging on the submissions. BountyQuest sent me two big binders with everything that had been submitted. They told me the things that seemed most relevant to them, but I made the final decisions -- and in fact, I thought that a couple of things were more compelling than they did, as patent lawyers, so I awarded a prize even though they thought that nothing definitive had turned up."

But scandal or not, BountyQuest had larger problems. There just didn't appear to be a market for its service. Cella had hoped that BountyQuest's initial successes at discovering prior art would knock out at least one or two bad patents, which would bring the site more attention, not just from the press, but also from lawyers and the U.S. Patent Office. But the Hollywood climax or "splash cases," as Cella calls them, never came.

BountyQuest tried to overcome the inability to build momentum by cold-calling patent lawyers and trying to sell them on the idea of running a contest for one of their cases. But few have proved willing to bite.

Randy Lipsitz -- a partner at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel in New York -- who remembers getting calls from BountyQuest, says he didn't use the company because he never had a client that felt satisfied with the old way of doing things. "There are experts out there who are knowledgeable in the field and you typically go to them," he says. "Prior art is information that needs to be mined. It needs to be put together like a puzzle. It requires expertise."

It also requires, suggests one BountyQuest competitor, a better appreciation of the whole market for prior art -- separate from the ideological goal of busting bad patents. Examples of prior art are commodities in and of themselves. If you can prove you've got prior art, you can sell it to a company wishing to bolster its own patent defense plans.

"BountyQuest was always a joke to those who understand prior art searching," says Greg Aharonian, who makes his living busting patents. "Professional searchers like myself typically bust patents for much less than what BountyQuest charges, and those patents we can't bust, well anyone smart enough to figure out how to find the prior art will know enough about the industry to go straight to the players -- law firms, companies -- and sell the prior art directly, cutting out the BountyQuest middlemen."

"Bezos and O'Reilly were never seriously interested in patent quality," he adds. "Bezos just used O'Reilly to help Amazon public relations. That Amazon ended up licensing the InTouch patent just shows how stupid the whole thing is."

Instead of relying on the patent market to adopt new ideas like BountyQuest's, government must intervene and create change, Aharonian says.

"One reform is to require applicants to do prior art searches, as opposed to the current rule that they disclose what they know," he says. "The current rule allows them to wimp out by saying, 'We didn't know because we didn't search.'"

Others are calling for more radical government reform. Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, argues Congress should exclude software from the patent system. "That," he says, "would really solve the problem."

Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and author of several books on code and intellectual property, takes a slightly more moderate stance. He argues that the PTO should never have started approving cyberspace patents in the first place. By allowing patents to cover innovations in software, the PTO dramatically expanded the scope of intellectual property law largely through a form of institutional inertia. "Rather than reason, what governs the current patent debate is bias -- bias in favor of a system that seems right just because it seems old," he writes in his latest book, "The Future of Ideas." "But the relevant system is not old -- it is being expanded in ways that would shock lawyers of a generation ago."

To stem the tide of cyberspace patents -- which essentially give creators a government-backed monopoly on the idea that's patented -- the PTO should not necessarily just kill the possibility of software patent, as Stallman suggests. But before approving more applications, the agency should first have to prove that software patents serve the larger goal of encouraging innovation. "We will never know what benefit this regulation provides," Lessig argues, "until we begin to demand that the regulation prove itself."

And even after this test is held, assuming software patents pass, Congress should go further, Lessig argues, by expanding the laws of disclosure. Software inventors now only have to reveal an idea's general description; they should also have to make the source code public.

Few of these experts have given up on market-based reform. Lessig and other academic researchers, in fact, will soon launch Creative Commons -- a market-based alternative to the intellectual property system that will offer free, customized licenses for artists, writers, programmers and others who want to, say, allow students to download their program's source code but not large companies.

Eben Moglen, a Columbia law professor and counsel to the Free Software Foundation, also has an idea of his own. He suggests collecting enough software-related prior art in one place to gain the kind of momentum that BountyQuest lacks.

"My impression is that the [BountyQuest] model ('We'll ask the questions and wait for others to come up with answers') is less effective than ('Here's an immense database of answers waiting for questions, and by the way if you've got answers we don't have, contribute those too')," he says. "A running nucleus, as the successful project leaders will tell you, is the seed that gets development growing."

But will any of these ideas be enough to transform the system, to staunch the flow of bad patents?

Cella and O'Reilly still believe that market-based reform is the best option. Joshua Kaplan, InTouch's CEO and a regular defender of the patent system, also figures that companies like BountyQuest are far from useless, and possibly helpful.

But the government is already beginning to awaken from its slumber. The Federal Trade Commission held the first hearings on the patent issue Feb. 6. And while slow, some say that the kind of reform that government can bring might be just what the patent system needs.

Some problems -- such as the call for source code disclosure -- can only be accomplished through legislative action. And BountyQuest's experience reveals just how hard it could be for any market-based idea to gain traction.

"The intellectual property system is resilient, and hard to reform," says Mark Lemley, an intellectual property expert and law professor at Berkeley.

"BountyQuest was a great idea and may still prove to be, but you must keep it in context," says Lessig. "It is a great idea for an awful system."

Even Cella has tempered his rhetoric. While he says that he's still "extremely skeptical about legal or political reforms" because "they take forever, and they are almost always subject to the law of unintended consequences," he also no longer focuses so heavily on what BountyQuest can do for the system. Instead, he speaks of broader changes. "We alone aren't going to provide enough of a reform," he says. "There needs to be more."

Will those who followed Cella into the wild-blue yonder of market-based reform also start to take a softer line on civic activism? To truly fix the patent system, they'll have to do more than tout the Net's ability to transform the world. They'll have to do more than trust BountyQuest.

As Stallman puts it: "BountyQuest can do more good than harm -- provided we don't mistake it for a real solution."

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