So they're basically hoping to get free labor using crowd sourcing. I don't see this taking off because I don't see the incentive for volunteers to put a lot of work into shooting down someone's patent. While the result will be less patents, a much preferable situation would be no patents at all.

I really wonder how it's supposed to work with the amount of patents granted nowadays. Say you come up with a new product, can you really be expected to go and read all pending patents in existence to verify you're not infringing? It's practically impossible, so I suppose it's mostly fingers crossed that you won't get sued.