1. Youth with a passion for invention are filing patent applications eagerly

According to the announcement made on the 5th by the KIPO and the Korea Invention Promotion Association, the number of students' ideas submitted to the 'Young Inventor Cultivation Program' managed by the two agencies is increasing. The Young Inventors Program is an institution for providing support to the process in which two to three middle and high school students make a team for a company-presented task to create invention ideas and make them grow into intellectual property. The participating companies present the youth with tasks that could interest them such as designs for cosmetics containers or electric products utilizing big data, and provide them with opportunities for education on intellectual property rights issues, enterprise field trips and patent consulting so that their ideas can be materialized. The number of cases officially filed for patent application through this program increased from 10 in 2009 to 70 last year and the total number of patent applications during this period reached 345.

2. Everybody can apply for patent cancellation

The KIPO will implement in March next year a Patent Cancellation Application System whereby it is possible for anybody to apply for patent cancellation. They said, The examiners of this country are burdened with too many patent applications to handle and have too short a time to review all the extensive prior arts, so we have prepared a backup system. If we look into the KIPO's patent invalidation trial status for the latest five years, the patent invalidation citing rate (invalidation decision at patent trials) amounted to 50.5%. The number of patents handled by one patent examiner of this country for one year is 221 on average, which is as much as four times compared to 57 for Europe and 73 for America.

3. KIPO's industrial property right dispute mediation applications rapidly increase by three times

Recently as disputes over industrial property rights such as trademarks and designs are increasing, the applications for industrial property right disputes that can be resolved quickly at low costs through dialogue and agreement between concerned parties are increasing as well. According to the KIPO on the 22nd day of the month, the KIPO's Industrial Property Right Dispute Mediation Committee received and resolved 182 disputes over industrial property rights as of last month since its establishment in 1995. Such applications were no more than five per year on average until 2013 and have rapidly increased to 11 for 2014, 17 for last year and 47 for this year. Recently, the Dispute Mediation Committee has quickly resolved dispute cases that have remained unsettled for a long period such as stopping infringement on patent, trademark and design rights, requesting compensation for damages, and non-fulfillment of contracts related to exclusive license agreements through mediation.

4. Fair Trade Commission sets up a new organization for catching ICT 'patent trolls'

According to the Fair Trade Commission on the 7th day of this month, a 'knowledge industry monitoring division' will be set up next week with seven persons including five persons under the Market Monitoring Bureau. So far the Service Industry Monitoring Division has been in charge of new industries such as ICT, pharmaceutical and bio industries. As for ICT field, a dedicated team was formed to investigate the practices of global enterprises, and now the team was formally expanded and reorganized to handle the matters of pharmaceutical and bio industries as well. The team dedicated to ICT was to aggressively deal with problems of unfair trade practices as there have been a series of tip-offs of unfair intellectual property practices by global companies. As a result of continued interest shown by Commissioner Jeong Jae-Chan, the expansion and reorganization became possible.