Patent research·analysis

Patent research services are patentability investigation, invalidation investigation, infringing material investigation etc. and patent analysis services are competitor analysis, patent trend investigation, patent map creation etc.

Patentability investigation is the service to previously check whether the invention can be registered. You can foresee the possibility of patent registration in advance prior to patent application and increase the likelihood of registration by writing the patent claim scope based on these materials when applying. Invalidation survey is the service to effectively respond to the dispute by invalidating the patent rights of others when you receive a written warning against a registered patent or infringement claims. Infringing material investigation is the service to determine whether the technology that I conducted infringes the patent rights of others or others infringe my patent rights. The competitor analysis analyzes and provides information such as technologies of competitors, key areas, key research personnel etc. by investigating patent activities of competitors. You can request the analysis by specifying a specific competitor and conduct the analysis by specifying a specific technical field and finding the competitor.

Patent trend analysis and patent map are used to quickly find out patent trends of the technology sector. This is the service to predict the technology flow of the future by analyzing related technologies in time series and effectively respond to it.
Therefore, core technologies and application technologies can be identified and excavation of vacant technology and avoidance design is possible.

Structure of patent statement

• Conventional technologies and technical problems of the conventional technologies
• Technical challenges to solve the problems
• The configuration of this invention to solve these technical challenges
• The resulting action and effects
• Scope requiring exclusive rights as a consideration of technology disclosure (Scope of patent claim)

Precautions for patent application

• You must apply a patent as soon as possible.
• The claim scope should be as wide as possible.
• The name of an applicant should be clear. The applicant is the final patent owner. Therefore, it is very important to determine whether it will be the name of a corporation or the name of CEO or joint name with other related persons
• When applying, it is important write application documents exactly in accordance with the statutory requirements.

Cost of domestic application

Costs related to domestic application are roughly composed of two kinds, agency costs and fees for office. Agency costs are costs paid to a patent law firm and fees for office are a kind of fees paid to the Korean Intellectual Property Office. Fees for office are the amount specified by the Korean Intellectual Property Office but it is difficult to determine agency costs uniformly because they are priced differently for each agent depending on the difficulty of technical contents and amount of written documents and drawings and the number of claims. Think that they are usually between 1 million and 2 million won in the normal range.

Patent Application No.

if you submit a patent application like this, fast and accurate patent application is made because application is made online these days and patent application No.is granted immediately as soon as a patent is applied.
If patent application No. and application date are fixed, your patented invention will be defended though other people apply similar technologies after that. If applying a patent, patent application No. is created and this is just the application No. completely apart from whether to register.And after 1 year 6 months from application date, application is disclosed and public No. is granted. Also, after examination is made by an examiner, if a patent is determined and registration fees are paid, registration No. is granted.

Request for patent

Examination, the procedure determining whether the Korean Intellectual Property Office allows patent rights, is made. Patent examination is made only for patent application which claimed examination within 3 years from patent application date not targeting all patent applications. Usually, when applying a patent, examination is also requested but examination is strategically requested at the appropriate time within five years depending on trends of competing technologies, market conditions or the characteristics of patent application technology. Therefore, it is preferable to respond flexibly depending on the contents and conditions of the technology rather than requesting examination unconditionally. Patent application with no request for examination within 5 years from patent application date is deemed withdrawn.

Importance of Overseas application

If a Korean application is filed within one year of the date your initial patent application is filed in your home country (for example, the United States, Japan, Europe or China), it allows some of the patent requirements to be applied as of the filing date of the earlier home filed application, not the Korean filing date of the later filed patent application (“priority claim”). Therefore, it is noted that Korean filing must be done within one year of your home application.

There are two options for foreign filing.
First is to file a patent application directly in a desired national patent office (filing in your home country first and then filing in Korea with claiming priority).
Second is to file an international application under PCT.

Individual application by country

It means to apply individually to each country's Intellectual Property Office by desired country.
The matters required when applying in an individual country can be listed as follows.

• If you file your foreign applications within one year of your first patent application in your home country, some of the patent requirements may be applied as of the filing date of the earlier home filed application, not the foreign filing date of the later filed patent application (“priority claim”). If you do not timely file your foreign applications within one year, your foreign patents may be rejected due to loss of novelty over intervening prior arts between the two filing dates of the earlier home and later foreign application.
• For foreign filings, applicants need to appoint an attorney per each country. As local attorneys cannot represent the applicants before foreign patent offices, the applicants should be represented by any attorney who is licensed to practice before the foreign patent offices. This incurs a lot of costs. Namely, foreign filings require local attorney fees, foreign attorney fees and foreign government filing fees.
• A statement should be rewritten in the language of the country. It may be simple translation but new contents will be added so it may be right to regard it as rewriting. Though English is a global language, patent application is submitted to the administrative office of each country so you must write it in the official language of the country.
• You must sign power of attorney, transfer certificate, declaration etc. to be submitted to each country and submit them by mail. The representative of each country gives this form.
• In order to claim for foreign priority, a certified copy of priority document must be obtained from home patent office and then forwarded to a corresponding foreign patent office. For some countries, legalized priority documents are required through the Embassy or Consulate. Priority document is a certified document for verifying the priority claim legally and is composed of a request form and a specification.

Like this, country-specific individual application procedure looks simple but it is difficult to deal with in a short period of time in terms of time, cost, and workload and a round sum is spent at a time. It takes approximately 1 to 2 months to prepare overseas application so you must hurry application preparation 10 months ago to keep one year of the priority claim period. To reduce such time, work burden and reduce initial costs, PCT international application system is used among PCT member countries.

PCT international application

The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) was concluded in 1970 to seek patent protection for an invention in a large number of countries via a simple and unified procedure for filing patent applications. The purpose of PCT is to reduce the initial economic and procedural burden of separate patent applications to each foreign patent office. Any resident of a PCT Contracting State may file an international application with a Receiving Office and designate multiple countries he desires. Once the PCT application is submitted, the PCT applicant may enter national stage entries of the PCT application with translation and payment of fees in his desired countries after a certain period of time. (Currently, upon filing of the PCT application, all contracting states are automatically designated.)

The main characteristics of the PCT application are the international filing procedure and the entry procedure into national and regional phases. A PCT application needs to be filed in one language only chosen by a Receiving Office (English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean). The PCT application has advantages in time and procedures and is cost-effective in terms of reducing the initial costs. Namely, the PCT applicant can save considerable time because he can enter the national phase at any time after PCT filing within the time limits.

However, as a whole, international application can be seen to be much more expensive than the case of individual country application because there is one more step in international application. And it is complicated to write an international application and preliminary examination etc. and whole procedures are somewhat more complicated.
Nevertheless, PCT international application can be said to be more advantageous than individual country application because in case of PCT international application, international investigation is made for all application cases and preliminary examination is made by requesting it. Therefore, in case of international application, even if specifying a number of countries, you can determine whether to enter into the country so international application is much more expensive but as a whole, you do not need to enter a designated country unnecessarily.

Significance of Judgment

Patent Judgment means litigation solving procedures done by examiner committee by configuring the Judgment Division in patent tribunal inside the Korean Intellectual Property Office for the purpose of quickly, fairly resolving disputes about certain matters raised between the parties about valid and invalid patent rights or punishment of an examiner about patent application etc.

Patent Judgment procedures

remised on request for judgment of parties, patent judgment has a series of courses conducted continuously for an examiner to induce the case to the conclusion, judgment conclusion, and these judgment procedures cannot be conducted arbitrarily by an examiner or party because fairness and severity are required in the procedures and the procedures should be especially conducted according to the patent law and the procedures in the Code of Civil Procedure applied by the patent law.

Patent trial is initiated by request for judgment and the Judgment Division is constituted and one of Judgment Division members becomes president of the jury to conduct and oversee the judgment procedures.
The president examines a case to see if there are defects in the way of request for judgment and if there are defects, he/she rejects the decision and if legitimate, Judgment Division panel examines legality of the judgment claim.
Judgment Division panel examines legality of the judgment claim and then, if illegality is found, it rejects it as judgment in accordance with court procedures and examines the original bill only if recognized as a legitimate judgment.
Patent judgment is carried out by Offizialprinzip and patent law takes precedence over several principles with respect to patent judgment such as examination method etc. and judgment hearing is carried out by applying the Code of Civil Procedure complementally.
If judgment examination has been conducted enough to hand down judgment, the Judgment Division notifies the parties of judgment termination and judges after a reasonable period of time has passed. At this time, there are two major judgments and one is quote judgment that a conclusion is made as intended by claimant's claim and the other is dismissal judgment if judgment is made differently from the purpose of the claimant's claim and patent judgment procedures are terminated by these judgments. If there is an appeal on patent judgment, you can raise the appeal to the patent court.

Significance of patent litigation

Patent law admits the appeal so a party can file a lawsuit in court or patent court for a certain matter of measures done by an examiner or the chief of the Korean Intellectual Property Office. Patent litigation is the term collectively called obtaining appeal for measures such as judgment etc. or procedures on patent of a court or patent court and there are appeal protesting against judgment etc. and appeal protesting against compensation etc. but the concept of patent litigation in a narrow sense is called the former.

Technical examiner system

Patent litigation requires accurate judgments of a person who has expertise on technology and technical examiner system in patent litigation is used as a means to assist the judgment of judges.That is, a technical examiner can participate in the proceedings of the hearing to ask questions to litigation parties about technical details and comment his/her opinion about agreement of the trial. On the other hand, Supreme Court rules determine qualifications of technical examiners but at present, it is made in the form of the Korean Intellectual Property Office employee's dispatch service.