Based on the recent chaos in the world of software patents, I've been trying to find out more about what happened to the old BountyQuest site. The gist was that it offered monetary rewards to people who would discover prior art potentially usable in court to have a patent revoked. The latest piece of info I found about the site's demise was the following: http://oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2003/bountyquest_1003.html
I'm wondering, has anything similar ever been attempted since then? It seems like a pretty straightforward idea: you pay people to look up info on a certain patent, you reward the valuable answers (evaluating these results is all but simple, and likely why the venture failed in the end, but that's another point altogether).
Has it really not been done ever since?
Thanks!