What are the advantages and disadvantages of making patent application documents public in advance?

According to the provisions of Article 34 of China's Patent Law, after receiving an application for a patent for invention, the administrative department for patent in the State Council, after preliminary examination, finds that it meets the requirements, and shall publish it 18 months after the date of application. The patent administration department of the State Council may publish its application at an early date upon the request of the applicant. Then, does the applicant need to submit a patent disclosure statement in advance, and what advantages and disadvantages will it bring to the patent applicant? First of all, in some cases, it is beneficial for the applicant to submit the patent disclosure statement in advance, which will be made public 18 months before the filing date. (1) According to Article 42 of the Patent Law, the term of the invention patent right is 20 years, counting from the date of application. However, according to Article 11 of the Patent Law, the patentee is granted the right to claim that others are prohibited from exploiting his patent only after the invention patent is granted. In this case, it is necessary for the patent applicant to obtain the patent right as soon as possible, whether it is to effectively extend the exercise time of the patent right or to match the life cycle of the product (such as electronic products and other products with shorter life cycle). In order to get the patent application authorized as soon as possible, it is very necessary to require the application documents to be published in advance. Because the application for a patent for invention must go through the substantive examination stage before it can be authorized, and the substantive examination can only be carried out after the patent application documents are published. Therefore, in theory, early disclosure may advance the time for substantive examination of its application documents to a certain extent. (2) According to Article 13 of the Patent Law, after the publication of an application for a patent for invention, the applicant for a patent may require the entity or individual exploiting the invention to pay an appropriate fee, that is, to obtain the so-called "temporary protection". Many products and/or methods involved in an application for a patent for invention are published by the applicant after the application date, such as product list or paper publication. In this case, it is particularly important to disclose the patent application documents in advance to obtain "temporary protection", especially for those products whose invention content can be easily obtained through reverse engineering. Although the patent law does not clearly stipulate the expenses involved in "temporary protection", the so-called "temporary protection" is not so easy to operate in practice. However, in the case that the patented technology has actually been made public, early disclosure can at least serve as a warning to the public, especially competitors in related industries. (3) According to Article 22 of the Patent Law, conflicting applications can only be used to evaluate the novelty of patent applications, but not the creativity of patent applications. In this case, opening the patent application in advance may have an effective negative impact on the creativity of competitors' later patent applications. The invention points of competitors' invention patent applications in this industry are often the same or similar. By requesting to disclose the contents of the patent application in advance, the applicant of the patent application can make the invention information recorded in his patent application enter the public domain as soon as possible, which belongs to the existing technology that can evaluate whether the later application is creative, thus reducing the probability of competitors obtaining patents on the related technologies of the patent application. Secondly, in some cases, the early disclosure of an application for a patent for invention may harm the interests of the applicant. (1) According to Article 32 of the Patent Law, the applicant can withdraw his patent application at any time before being granted the patent right. According to whether the patent application documents are open or not, there are two situations for the applicant to withdraw his patent application, one is before the application is open, and the other is after the application is open. These two situations will have completely different effects on the interests of patent applicants. If the patent application documents are not made public, after the applicant withdraws the patent application, he can choose to keep it confidential as a technical secret, or he can apply for a patent again for the technology itself or after further improvement. However, if the patent application documents have been published, it means that the technology has entered the well-known technical field. After withdrawing the application, the applicant lost the opportunity to obtain patent protection for the technical content. Therefore, the later the patent application documents are published, the longer it takes the applicant to decide whether to publish them, so that he can enter the public domain. (2) According to Article 22 of the Patent Law, conflicting applications can only be used to evaluate the novelty of patent applications, but not the creativity of patent applications. The applicant's early disclosure of patent application will have a negative impact on the creativity of competitors' later patent application, and may also have a negative impact on his later patent application. This has a particularly obvious impact on a series of patent applications in the process of continuous scientific research. If a person's previous patent application is novel and creative, then it is bound to be novel and creative to file a subordinate patent application before publication. However, if the subordinate patent application is submitted after the publication of its earlier application, the invention disclosed in the earlier application cannot be used to support the novelty and creativity of the later subordinate patent application. Here, we should pay attention to distinguish the relationship between our prior patent application and "conflicting application". Conflicting applications only refer to patent applications filed by "others" in advance and published later, excluding their own unpublished prior applications. Patent applicants should not scare themselves with their early application, saying that their later application is not novel and creative, but they should pay attention to its disclosure period. (3) According to the provisions of Articles 19 and 21 of the Patent Law, before the patent application is published or announced, the agent, the staff of the State Council Patent Administration Department and relevant personnel shall bear the responsibility of confidentiality. That is to say, before the publication of the application for a patent for invention, it is impossible for the competitor of the patent applicant to know the content of the patent application. Before technology development, enterprises often need to obtain the latest trends and research results of related technologies through patent retrieval. Then according to the relevant information obtained by patent search, the corresponding technology development strategy and other related strategies are formulated. Therefore, the later the patent application documents are published, the later the competitors get to know the technical information, and they realize that their R&D is repeated, and they will carry out further R&D on this basis. In other words, the later the patent application is made public, the more likely it is to disrupt the strategic deployment of competitors and greatly increase the capital cost and time cost of competitors.