I worked at a Patent Law firm for 4 years and submitted thousands of prior art references to the USPTO in patent applications. I will try to answer your questions as best as I can. I'm not a lawyer and definitely not a patent lawyer. (I'm in my final year of law school.)
1) No — The Examiner will probably look at it, but it is not official unless the Examiner acknowledges consideration in a communication to the applicant. Also, there are certain time limits that apply.
2) If you mean, "does the prior art need to be a patent?", the answer is no. You can submit anything that discloses the invention (for example a website printout, a book, or an article). If you mean, "must the prior art be submitted in a particular patent?," the answer is yes. You need to submit the prior art to the Examiner in each patent application.
3) Yes. To submit prior art in a granted patent, you would need to reopen examination or challenge the patents validity in legal or administrative proceedings. Prior art is supposed to be disclosed during or prior to examination of a pending application.
4) I don't know, but I think it could if that video clip disclosed the substantive technology in a meaningful way, and wasn't just a bare concept.
The rules for submitting prior art by members of the public are contained in 37 CFR 1.291.
I took 2) to mean, 'When I submit prior art, must I do so to challenge a particular patent? Or can I submit prior art for general consideration, in case anyone happens to submit a patent application to which the prior art applies?'
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.
I don't recall seeing patents in any of my alerts. I have a few hundred on different topics/keywords, some of which definitely show up in patents. I could just be wrong, but it's possible that they are filtering out their patent search results.
I just tried adding the word "patent" to a search, and the top results returned were kind of relevant, but you're right, not direct patent links. Mostly news, but also a decent hit on a site called FreshPatents.com, which may be the service you are looking for.
1) Does submission of prior art guarantee it will be looked at and considered ?
2) Must a prior art submission always be associated with a particular patent or set of patents ?
3) Can one submit prior art for a patent that does not exist yet or is in pending stage.
4) Do things like video clips (say of movies), showing objects or devices that don't exist, count as prior art ?