Jung-Sik Koh, head of the Korean IP Office (KIPO) chaired a meeting held in Jeju, Korea from October 27 to 28. It was attended by Alison Brimelow, president of the European Patent Office (EPO); Takashi Suzuki, commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO); Tian Lipu, commissioner of China's State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO); and Jon Dudas, director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Following the meeting, the offices published a vision statement. The aims of the statement are: elimination of unnecessary duplication of work among the offices; enhancement of patent examination efficiency and quality; guarantee of the stability of international patent rights.
In a joint statement the offices claimed that 250,000 patent applications are being filed at two or more of the five offices each year, which leads to redundant search and examination work and increased patent pendency.
To reduce the problem, each of the five offices has committed to lead two foundation projects. These aim to increase harmonisation and enable greater work sharing and are distributed around the offices:
The EPO: a common documentation database with resource material for patent examination and a common approach for a hybrid classification of patents across offices.
KIPO: common training policy for patent examiners and mutual machine translation to overcome language barriers.
JPO: common access to search and examination results across offices and common application format to ensure that patents are digitally filed in XML-format.
SIPO: common rules for examination practice and quality control to harmonise patent quality standards and common statistical parameter system for examination for accurate international patent statistics.
USPTO: common approach to sharing and documenting search strategies and common search and examination support tools in a shared system.
The only deadline contained in the statement is that the offices will exchange "detailed proposals" on each project identifying areas of agreement and details of implementation by the end of April next year.
The meeting of the five biggest offices will be followed by the 26th meeting of the Trilateral (JPO, USPTO and EPO) in The Hague on November 14. An EPO spokesperson told Managing IP that the agenda of the meeting will be aligned with that of the meeting in Jeju.
The November edition of Managing IP (available online later this week) will contain an interview with KIPO commissioner Jung-Sik Koh
