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.
