Legal Question in Intellectual Property in New York

The easiest way to check is at uspto.gov. If you submit an application for an idea, it will be rejected.

1. The website at www.uspto.gov is a bit complex, so you should navigate your way to the section on that site called Public PAIR. There you would enter the publication number of the published patent application and then access the entire prosecution history of that patent application. You will see a docket of each event in the patent prosecution and will be able to download in PDF format either individual documents or all of them as a single batch.

2. If we were talking about a trademark application, then the answer might be a qualified YES. But since you have identified a PATENT application, the answer is NO. That's because the published patent application would almost certainly be "prior art" against any patent application you might subsequently file for your own idea/invention. Section 102 of the U.S. patent law prohibits someone from patenting an invention that is already in the prior art.

I could imagine a situation where the prior-art disclosure is so vague and incomplete as to fail to teach someone skilled in the art how to make and use the invention. Such an incomplete disclosure might even fail to make it obvious how one might do so by combining the disclosure with other publicly available subject matter. In that unique situation, which is presumably not what you have found, then it MIGHT be possible to file a new patent application for one's own invention, having been fully fleshed out as an enabling disclosure and written description of the invention, and perhaps thereafter meet the requisites of patentability: novelty (as against all prior art), utility, and nonobviousness from a combination of references in the prior art.