Targeting Applicants Should Be Expressly Authorized to File 37 CFR 1.313 Petitions to Withdraw Target Applications From Issuance for Consideration of a Possible Interference

A recurrent situation is that the owner of a patent or an application becomes aware of the existence of an application that it believes to interfere with its own patent or application, which application is owned by another company, after the other company’s application has been allowed. At that point the first company can, of course, file a 37 CFR 1.604 request for an interference with the target application.3 (If the first company owns a patent rather than an application, it will have to file an application to reissue that patent before or concurrently with its 37 CFR 1.604 request, but that is not a problem.) However, that request is extremely unlikely to lead to the immediate declaration of the desired interference unless the first company can get the target application withdrawn from issue.

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