Third Party Submissions

In a prior post, I wrote about third party prior art submissions, but that post was only looking at issued patents. I have gone back and pulled-in data from all publicly-available applications, including those that have been abandoned or are still pending.  The results: third parties have submitted prior art in about 7,000 applications over the past decade.  This is about 0.2% of all the applications in my dataset.

I have uploaded the listing of all the applications with third-party submissions (and current status of each application) at the link below.  Dennis Crouch, Third Party Submissions, Harvard Dataverse (Feb. 4, 2022), https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/M5JK3Y.

I pulled up a recent case. U.S. App. No. 16/824,815 focusing on a vehicle heads-up display owned by Visteon.  A third party (James D. Busch) submitted his own published patent application (US Pub. No. 20180217429) as prior art and included a 30-page “concise description of relevance.”   At that point, the examiner issued an anticipation rejection and the patentee abandoned.  Note here that Busch is both a prolific inventor and a patent attorney.  He has an interesting article suggesting that patentees may want to use 3rd party submissions in order to seed forward citations of your patent.