1. A meeting of statistics experts from five (5) world intellectual property offices (IP5) was held in the Republic of Korea
- The meeting was to share trends of filing intellectual property applications and to discuss new tasks applying intelligence information technology.
The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) announced that a ‘6th IP5 statistics working group meeting’ was held in Seoul from August 28 to September 1, to discuss a plan for improving the quality of IP5 statistics.
In this meeting, about 30 people, including the hands-on staff in the field of IP5 statistics and WIPO personnel, attended to proceed with an in-depth discussion to exchange and use statistical data.
Specifically, this year, which is the IP5 ten year anniversary since its establishment, is an important time to evaluate the tasks carried forward meantime and to select new tasks in order to effectively cope with the changed intellectual property environments. The Republic of Korea, a chairman country of this meeting, played an important role in checking the major promotion tasks, such as the publication of the IP5 statistics report, etc., predicting a scale of applications using Artificial Intelligence adopted to effectively cope with the 4th industrial revolution era, and leading new tasks through an agenda for a system of the Internet of Things technology classification.
2. KIPO executed training for KIPOnet disaster restoration in preparation for a disaster or catastrophe
- Together with the National Information Resources Service, KIPO conducts a check for the service operation within three (3) hours upon the occurrence of a disaster.
KIPO executed the training for KIPOnet disaster restoration on August 27, 2017, to inspect a rapid reaction system in preparation for a KIPOnet interruption status caused by a disaster or catastrophe.
In the event that KIPOnet in the Gwangju center of the National Information Resources Service cannot provide services due to a natural disaster or cyber terror, this training was to check whether it is possible to perform, without any problems, the public service, such as the filing of an application, etc., and the internal work, such as examination and trial, etc., by rapidly using a disaster recovery system in Daejeon.
About 40 experts of KIPO and the National Information Resources Service were input to reopen the services by the initial reaction training, such as a situation notice and a crisis administration organization call, and the use of the disaster restoration system and to check the overall disaster restoration system, such as the monitoring of restoration details, upon the interruption status.
3. Design applications related to items for living, furniture, home appliances aimed at a single person household have been actively filed
According to KIPO, as the number of single person households has increased, the number of design applications related to the items for living, furniture, small home appliances which fit the single life style and personality, has steadily increased. This is because the number of single person households is over 5,000,000, the scale of consumption expenditure has increased, and companies have positively started the development of designs for industry products for a single person and the filing of design applications for those products.
The field of representative designs targeted at a single person household is items for living. As a demand for convenience foods has increased, the number of design applications for lunch containers (including food trays, single service package containers, etc.) increased from 11 in 2007 to 113 in 2016 by more than ten (10) times, and was 70 as of July this year, showing rapid growth. This growth is considered as resulting from the expansion in the demand of convenience foods, such as small amount products and precooked foods, in the food market since the number of single person households has increased.
The number of applications for designs targeted at single person households with purchasing power has increased in the field of household appliances including refrigerators, washing machines, rice cookers, etc. The number of the design applications in this field was only 24 in 2007 but increased to 94 in 2016 by about four (4) times.
4. Korean R&D for future materials in the field of optical devices have poured out
- The number of patent applications related to the transition metal chalcogen compounds has rapidly increased.
According to KIPO, the number of patent applications related to the transition metal chalcogen compounds, filed for the last five (5) years (2012~2016), was a total of 214, showing an increase of about four (4) times compared to 55 for the previous five (5) years (2007~2011), and has greatly increased every year.
Meantime, the research on nano ribbon forming and doping to form a band gap in graphene has been actively performed. However, there have been problems in that the forming of a band gap is restrictive, and even though a band gap is formed, charge-transfer rapidly decreases.
The metal chalcogen compounds are nano materials having a similar structure with graphene, have flexible and transparent features with a 1~2eV band gap. Therefore, the metal chalcogen compounds perfectly supplement the drawback of graphene in that it is difficult to manufacture a logic circuit.
Based on the current status (2012~2016) of the relevant patent applications, Korean applicants filed most of these patent applications (187 applications, 87.4%). Foreign applications filed 27 applications (12.6%) with US applicants having 10, European 9, Taiwanese 5 and Japanese 3.
This is because the Republic of Korea which is a semiconductor power has been aggressively seeking to do research and development in the field of optical devices, such as photo sensors or solar cells, etc., using the metal chalcogen compounds following graphene.
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