Provisional Patent Application validity questions

Question

I am considering filing a Provisional Patent Application (PPA) on my own.

1. If PPAs are never examined, is it correct to assume that I get a "patent pending" on whatever (since it is not published at the time of filing) immediately after I submit the pdf files and pay the fee?

2. Suppose that I file at T=0, I disclose at T=+3 days, and I file for a non-provisional at T=+10 months, and somehow the PTO decides that the original PPA isn't valid enough to serve as a prior date, can I simply file another PPA or a new non-provisional immediately, given that I am still within one year of the disclosure, and that others haven't filed a similar application from T+3 days to t+10 months,

I am asking this after reading the following two paragraphs, from USPTO and Wikipdia:

Beware that an applicant who publicly discloses his or her invention (e.g., publishes, uses, sells, or otherwise makes available to the public) during the 12 month provisional application pendency period may lose more than the benefit of the provisional application filing date if the 12 month provisional application pendency period expires before a corresponding nonprovisional application is filed. Such an applicant may also lose the right to ever patent the invention. See 35 U.S.C. §§102(a)(1) and (b)(1).

If a non-provisional application is not expected to be filed within one year, and the patent is not otherwise barred by law, another provisional application may also be filed at any time and start another one-year period (but this does not work in all cases).[10] However, the original priority date of any expired provisional applications will be forfeited.

The rationale behind this question is somewhat a fail safe measure. That is, in the scenario that a PPA is invalidated, can I simply, within a few days, file a new application, thereby continuing to protect the invention even the initial PPA is wasted?

Answer 1

1. Yes - you can refer to the subject matter covered in a filed provisional application patent pending. The fee actually doesn't need to be paid on that day for it to count as the filing date - you get a couple of months to get the $$ in before the application will go abandoned.

2. This may help you see the answer to your question: (a) If a disclosure (by you) is made and a year goes by without any kind of an application being filed by you, then you are bared from patenting the disclosed material. Period. (b) Unless a non-provisonal application is filed within a year of a provisional application being filed that points back to the provisional, it is as if the provisional was never filed.(c) No one-to-one correspondence between provisional and non-provisonal applications is required or assumed. You can file a provisional application with constant or changing content every month for N months and then file one or more non-provisonals that claim the benefit of any relevant provisional that is less than a year old that day.