The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) has operated a pilot trial for a Community Patent Review (CPR) system since March 2010.
Due to ever advancing and complex technologies, the volume of documents for prior arts for examiners to search has become enormous. In this regard, the CPR system allows experts and technical professionals in charge of practical jobs mainly in high tech-related organisations to be utilised for patent examinations.
In the trial CPR system, the KIPO will be gathering the opinions of reviewers for 50 chosen patent applications in the fields of mobile communication, e-commerce, computers and displays from March 2010 through June 2010. For that reason, the KIPO has been publishing abstracts of applications and the Patent Laid-Open Gazette has been arranged and sorted by technical field. The KIPO has also been recruiting reviewers through the CPR community opened on the web site used for filing patent applications electronically, TuekhuhRo (Patent Road) (www.patent.go.kr).
Engineers working at laboratories, companies, colleges, patent law firms etc are eligible to be a reviewer and can participate after simply completing application procedures online. A reviewer can set forth his/her own opinion and materials of prior arts related to the examined application and can also exchange technological know-how through networks of experts in the same field. The collected materials and opinions are provided to the examiner in charge for the examiner to refer to when examining the application. Whether the materials and opinions are utilised for an examination is published on the CPR community thereafter.
CPR projects seeking opinions about prior arts and patent registrability regarding patent applications from outside experts have already begun in the US and Japan and CPR projects have been internally evaluated as achieving the desired results. The CPR projects in the US and Japan were initiated as a test to relieve a backlog of applications, to accelerate examination and to improve the quality of examination and now, the official introduction of CPR programmes is being favourably considered. However, considering that the term for examination in Korea is much shorter than in other countries, we expect the main benefit of a public examination through a CPR programme would be improving the quality of examination.
The KIPO believes that such co-operation with engineers will be a chance for greater professionalism and transparency of patent examinations and for improvement of the quality of examination.
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| Hyun Yul Kang and Chad (Chang Hoon) Lee |
MUHANN Patent & Law Firm
5th Floor, Myeonglim Bldg
51-8 Nonhyeon-Dong, Gangnam-Gu
Seoul, 135-814
Korea
Tel: +82 2 511 4210
Fax: +82 2 511 4610
ip@muhann.com
www.muhann.com