1. KIPO held a ‘2017 intellectual property (IP) forum on next generation semiconductors’
The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) and the Korea Semiconductor Industry Association (KSIA) held the 2017 IP forum on the next generation semiconductors on December 22, 2017 in the seminar room on the 9th floor of KSIA building.
The foregoing event jointly hosted by KIPO and KSIA has been held every year since 2013, including the 5th event in 2017, to strengthen communications among the staff in charge of patent-related matters in Korean semiconductor companies, researchers, professors and employers in patent attorney-related industrial business and to strengthen the IP capabilities.
Specifically, this year seems to be recorded as a significant year in the Korean semiconductor industrial history. A chance for the Korean semiconductor manufacturing equipment field to lead in regional sales and win Taiwan is high for the first time in 2017 due to the ‘super cycle’ of the semiconductor industry which has been riding high.
This event considered the subjects of “the current state of Chinese IP and the strategies to cope with disputes” and “technical trends of semiconductor etching equipment”, to improve the future competitiveness of Korean semiconductor companies.
2. A website for the five (5) advanced IP Office in the design field (ID5) was publicly opened
- The website provides services enabling to view the design protection system of the major countries at a glance.
According to KIPO, the official website of ID5 (http://id-five.org) started on December 4. ID5 means the Industrial Design five (5) offices and a consultative group of the five (5) advanced countries, the Republic of Korea, US, Europe, Japan and China, which occupy about 90% of the number of the whole world design applications.
The official website of ID5 has the concept, ‘understanding the diverse design systems’, and consists of a simple menu enabling a user to view and compare the systems of the major countries. Once the services enabling the search of each country’s major statistics, the relevant laws and the ID5 meeting content have been performed, it is possible to easily obtain the design information of the country, US, China, etc., in which a user is interested, and therefore this website is considered to be very helpful to an individual and a company, which wants to file a design application in a foreign country, and a patent attorney as an agent.
The website has been built as a responsive web so that general users at home and abroad can conveniently use it via smart phones or tables. The basic language is English and the main information is available in three languages, Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
Further, an SNS sharing function is added for people to share the concerned content, and an event menu is newly formed to view each country’s design-related event.
3. A KIPO-WIPO joint international technical cooperation seminar was held in Seoul
KIPO and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) held the KIPO-WIPO joint international technical cooperation seminar on December 15, 2017 in the Korea Intellectual Property Service Center.
The seminar, where about 130 people attended, introduced KIPO’s program to share international intellectual property and KIPO’s cases to support the technology of the Korean companies including Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Hyundai Engineering & Constructions Co., Ltd., and etc. in foreign countries.
Marcelo di Pietro, Director of the Development Sector of WIPO, introduced a method of using the ‘WIPO Match’ database and a method of building a global technical transfer network using the WIPO Match database. WIPO Match is a system which WIPO operates to connect a technical demander of a developing country and a technical supplier of an advanced country, for an economic growth using intellectual properties.
KIPO has not only shared the results of economic growth using Korean intellectual properties with developing countries but also internationally spread Korean intellectual property polices through the cooperation with WIPO. Specifically, through the program to share an international intellectual property, KIPO developed proper techniques using the information of an expired patent, to be transferred to developing countries.
4. Filing patent applications in the field of information search to use big data is active
KIPO reviewed the trends of patent applications in the field of information search which is a technology related to the 4th industrial revolution. As a result, the number of the relevant patent applications sharply increased over the last five (5) years by more than 20% every year.
Based on the current status of the relevant applications by years, the number of those applications was 464 in 2012, which increased to 526 in 2013, 667 in 2014, 921 in 2015 and 979 in 2016, showing an annual average increase of 21.1% during the period from 2012 to 2016. This increase is considered to have a big relation to the big data and artificial intelligence technical development.
The trend of the relevant applications by applicants is that: 75% are Korean applicants and 25% are foreign applicants. 40% of the Korean applicants are companies (including 22% with small and medium companies and 18% with big companies), 24% are universities and contributed research institutes, and 11% are individuals.
The filing of the applications by big companies recently tends to be reduced, whereas that by small and medium companies, universities and institutes has greatly increased. This is considered to reflect the tendency that the information search technique using big data has been dispersed to various service fields.
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