>When you submit a patent application, it becomes public forever, even if it's rejected. You will have paid legal fees with the end result of granting competitors access to your ideas.
Not entirely true. If you don't want an application to publish, there are options available. Under certain circumstances (i.e., you are 100% certain that you do not want to file for foreign patent protection in other countries), you can file with a non-publication request, and the application will not become public until it proceeds to issuance as a patent.
If it never proceeds to issuance as a patent, then filing it with a non-pub request will at least make it harder to find. It will then only become publicly available (in this case, in the USPTO's Public PAIR database) if it's referenced as a priority app in another published application or issued patent.
If it's abandoned and never referred to again in any application, then you have to file a petition to gain access to the file wrapper contents.
Not entirely true. If you don't want an application to publish, there are options available. Under certain circumstances (i.e., you are 100% certain that you do not want to file for foreign patent protection in other countries), you can file with a non-publication request, and the application will not become public until it proceeds to issuance as a patent.
If it never proceeds to issuance as a patent, then filing it with a non-pub request will at least make it harder to find. It will then only become publicly available (in this case, in the USPTO's Public PAIR database) if it's referenced as a priority app in another published application or issued patent.
If it's abandoned and never referred to again in any application, then you have to file a petition to gain access to the file wrapper contents.