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 Patent News |
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| Subject : South Korea’s patent office will train examiners from the United Arab Emirates |
| Date |
2010-07-30 |
Visit |
4336 |
South Korea’s patent office will train examiners from the United Arab Emirates in a package of economic cooperation deals signed by the finance ministers of the two nations.
The agreement with the Middle Eastern business hub will pave the way for further deals with other nations in the region, the Korea Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) said. It also reflects the growing cordiality between Korea and the UAE after Korean firms were awarded a $20 billion nuclear plant deal earlier this year.
KIPO is one of the five largest patent offices in the world, and is regarded to have the fastest and the most affordable patent filing process. The UAE is currently outsourcing its patent affairs to Austria due to a short history of managing intellectual properties.
``The UAE currently has only a few patent examiners now, so it may take about 10 years for them to process an application. They had no choice but to outsource to other nations, which can be a sensitive issue. We are going to help them train new examiners in order so they can establish their own intellectual property system,’’ a KIPO official who is knowledgeable on the issue told The Korea Times, adding it can become a kind of export business for the state in the long run.
In a press release, Kim Chang-ryong, director general of the KIPO, said that Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have the potential to become Korea’s next partners in the patent business. ``We will continue to strengthen cooperation with the UAE patent office and pursue partnerships with other offices in the Middle East, which will affirm our status,’’ he said.
As science and technology becomes more complicated day by day, protecting intellectual property by setting up a national patent system is becoming a more critical issue for governments. In 2009, Korean firms paid $3.9 billion in net royalty to foreign firms, a threefold increase over the past two decades, while income has also grown at a similar pace.
KIPO has been seeing a dramatic improvement of its system over the past 10 years. It takes about 18 months for an application to be awarded or a patent to be rejected, which is faster than most other nations, while the application and licensing fees have remained relatively cheap.
Korea is also a member of the so-called IP5 group, along with the United States, Japan, China and the European Union, which accounts for 80 percent of all patent applications filed in the world. The group is now working to build a ``patent highway’’ system where the members can consult with each other in order to shorten the processing time for a national patent examination.
The joint action regarding intellectual property services was one of many deals South Korea and the UAE agreed on during Wednesday’s meeting, which marked the 30th anniversary of the two nations’ diplomatic relationship. They discussed eight sectors such as energy, health and welfare, education, public administration and tariffs, and signed two memorandums of understanding on the cooperation in national statistics and intellectual property sectors.
They also agreed to exchange officials of national investment bodies in order to share knowledge and know-how in managing sovereign wealth funds. |
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