OK, that's what I was trying to answer in the second option I gave. Based on my experience with the PTO, if you submitted prior art for general consideration, it would simply be returned to you or maybe discarded. There is no system in place to process and vet "loose" information. Everything submitted needs to be directed at an application file.
It would be cool if there was a database people could contribute to, but in theory the Examiner should be able to find this stuff in their prior art searches anyway.
Thanks for your detailed response. Yes, it would be good to have a kind of repository where people could submit their ideas or designs in order to prevent future patents. Somewhat like copylefting code.
This has been tried a number of times, and none have succeeded.
The reality is examiners have a very small amount of time.
Somebody has to do the work of verifying submissions, and making it reliable, and they don't have time to look through large sets of maybe unreliable data.
It's not enough to just submit an idea, you need the date the idea was conceived of, as well of some verification that this occurred.
