1. “Technology Bank”, which shares excellent technologies owned by big companies with small and medium venture businesses, will be established

The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy signed a technology sharing business agreement to introduce a technology bank and also announced a Fifth Technical Transfer and Commercialization Promotion Plan for creating a technical commercialization ecological system.

The Technology Bank to be established next year is an institution in which patented technologies or ideas provided by big companies, research institutions and universities are evaluated so as to transfer potential and promising technologies to small and medium businesses with support for commercialization. It is one of the tasks of the three-year plan of economic innovation announced by the government last February. By 2015, an on-line pool will be built for potential technologies owned by big businesses and they will be transferred to companies that need them by utilizing off-line organizations (such as TP, the Korea Institute of Startup & Entrepreneurship Development and the Creative Economy Innovation Center), and support will be provided for the development and commercialization of follow-up technologies.

2. Patents will be cancelled by examiner’s official authority

The KIPO, which is pushing for an amendment to patent law to improve patent administration to an advanced level, is trying to amend the patent law to enhance convenience of patent application and improve patent quality with a goal of enforcing it in 2016.

A two-track trial system for invalidation of a patent to be established anew includes an “examiner’s authority to cancel”, whereby it will be easy for the examiner to remove a right for re-examination to improve patent quality and prevent a patent with a significant defect from causing chaos to the industry and market, and a “claim for successive examination”, whereby a patent can be re-examined with free amendment even after it was decided to be patented.

Further, the concept of patent right enforcement will be expanded to also include export products which are subject to patent infringement, a weighted damage compensation system will be introduced, the data submission order will be strengthened, and regulations for infringement and damages will be reviewed for rationalization of protection.

In addition, an “effective information disclosure system”, whereby it is mandatory to describe the document names specifying prior arts such as reference documents of a paper at the time of filing a patent, and a “non-exclusive license fair defiance system”, whereby a third party has a right to defy just by verification of the fact of contract without registration of non-exclusive license with the KIPO, are under review for introduction to strengthen patent utilization.

3. Civilian experts of patent examination will be trained

To alleviate the burden of patent examiner’s examination process and improve examination quality, a prior art investigator qualification system will be introduced in 2016. In consideration of the current situation where it is difficult to increase the number of examiners, the patent examination method will be reorganized. Prior art investigation is a work of investigating whether there are any prior arts similar to the patent being examined. The examiners themselves used to do this work before, but their work load has increased with the increase in the number of patent applications, so it has been outsourced since 1992, reaching 50% outsourcing at this time. As of 2012, the number of processes per examiner is 254, which is higher than Japan (239), America (72) and China (54). It is necessary to increase the number of examiners and outsourcings for reduction of the examination time and improvement of quality.

4. “Is my patent being processed well?” It can be checked online

From now on, it can be checked online what kind of administrative process my patent is undergoing. The KIPO announced on the 27^th that “legal status information” of domestic intellectual property rights (patents, utility models, trademarks and designs) will be provided free from the 28^th through KIPRIS Plus (plus.kipris.or.kr)”, which is a web service for patent information.

Legal status information means history information of legal status generated from implementation of patent administration from application for an individual intellectual property right to the lapse of it. With an aim to produce high-level intellectual property information for service to the public, for the past one year, the KIPO has been building a database by defining 832 administrative actions based on intellectual property law and 267 legal statuses according to the same and applying them to 6.8 million domestic intellectual property rights.