1. KIPO held a 5th IP5 Patent Examination Policy Practice (WG3) Conference
- Plans to strengthen cooperation in examination work were discussed
The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) announced that the 5th IP5 Patent Examination Policy Practice (WG3) Conference and 2nd Patent Harmonization Expert Panel (PHEP) Conference were held from October 29 to November 1, 2013 in the Daejeon Government Complex, the Republic of Korea.
The WG3 means the Working Group 3 to discuss common examination practice guidelines and quality management, examination working cooperation, examination-related common statistical indicator, joint examiner training policy, etc.
The PHEP is for an expert discussion to unify the patent laws among IP5.
The IP5 Conference is a meeting of the five (5) countries advanced in intellectual property (IP), the Republic of Korea, the USA, Japan, China and Europe.
This Conference was attended by about 40 people including the staff leaders in the patent policy field of the IP5 Patent Offices and concerned people of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), to conduct an in-depth discussion on the totality of patent policy-related matters, such as work-sharing for efficient use of patent examination results, harmonization of patent systems to unify the patent law systems of countries and plans to improve the quality of international searches according to the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), etc.
Especially, various plans to tune the standards for patentability determination and procedures among the IP5 and to strengthen the work-sharing for using the mutual examination results were discussed. The plans are expected to be drawn to be helpful in enhancing the conformity of each country’s examination results and shortening the examination processing period.
2. The Korean Intellectual Property Tribunal (KIPT) has published a substance collection of the design sentencing
In the Samsung-Apple litigation in 2011, when the fact that Apple had brought an infringement suite based on a number of design rights familiar to ordinary people as well as a patent technology was released to the media, people’s interest in design has never been as high.
In line with such an increase in the interest in design, KIPT published the ‘substance collection of design sentencing’, which analyses main design-related verdict cases made in the Patent Court and Supreme Court, to increase the intelligibility of a related party(ties) of a trial/lawsuit on a design right and to improve the quality of a design trial case.
The ‘substance collection of the design sentencing’ includes 45 design cases (including 2 ex parte cases and 43 inter partes cases) extracted from the cases judged in the Patent Court and the Supreme Court in 2012. It also sequentially arranges the history of each case at the trial stage at the Patent Court and the Supreme Court, making it easy to understand the details and main issues of the case. Regarding a case where issues are complicated, the collection organizes the matters of the sentencing in more detail, to assist in the understanding of the case.
3. The number of patent applications for LTE-A has rapidly increased
How does LTE-A (LTE-Advanced) have a faster speed than the existing LTE? It is by virtue of the carrier aggregation (CA) technology which uses a number of frequency bands by binding them like a single frequency band.
LTE-A provides stable data communications by applying the Coordination Multi Point (CoMP) technology which base stations mutually cooperatively control and the enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination (eICIC) technology which controls the frequency interference between a macro cell and a micro cell.
According to KIPO, the LTE-A related patent applications were first filed at the end of 2008 and rapidly increased from 2010. This is due to the increase in the number of the applications related to the LTE-A standardization of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), mobile telecommunications standard development organization. The applications for the standardization related technologies have been steadily filed up to now.
LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics as Korean companies have filed the most applications (about 40%), followed by Pantech, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, SK Telecom and KT which are mobile telecommunication service companies. Qualcomm, Ericsson, ZTE, Nokia as foreign companies have filed a number of the applications.
4. Chinese officials meet with Korean companies and discuss IP protection in the Republic of Korea
- KIPO invited the officials in charge of Chinese IP rights to the Republic of Korea and performed the IP field training for them.
KIPO, Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) and Korea Intellectual Property Protection Association (KIPPA) jointly invited 28 central and provincial officials in charge of IP protection services in China to the Republic of Korea. They performed the IP field training for them for five (5) days from October 7 to 11.
The attendees for the training included the officials, judges and professors handling the IP-related services in each of the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC) of the People’s Republic of China (both in charge of the Chinese governmental IP rights), courts, customs, universities, etc.
After the training was performed, last year, Korea Ginseng Corporation actually found a local fake factory in cooperation with the Kwangtung Provincial Administration for Industry and Commerce, to crack down on the fake products reaching a manufacturing cost of 6.6 billion Korea Won (corresponding to a sale price of about 20 billion Korea Won).
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