- KIPO enters cooperative agreement with Empas, a commercial portal -


To promote the use of patent information and to raise public interest towards intellectual property, KIPO (Commissioner: Sang-Woo Jun) entered a cooperation agreement with Empas Co Ltd (President: Seok-Bong Park). Under this agreement, KIPO will provide an ‘Opened Search Service’ on patent information on the search portal site at www.empas.com.


Through this cooperation agreement between KIPO and Empas, ‘Netizens’ will have easy access not only to patent promotion information, but also to the research reports and publications owned by KIPO. This agreement will drastically expand public accessibility for information related to intellectual property.


Realizing the necessity of promoting public access and use of patent information by adapting IT technology and the marketing ability of commercial portal companies, Commissioner Sang-Woo Jun had already entered a cooperation agreement with another internet portal site, Naver, in 2005. The additional agreement with Empas is still significant, since it broadened the path to intellectual property information by allowing people’s access to this information even more conveniently.


Under this agreement, Empas is planning to provide a customized intellectual property search service for specific groups, including the general population, students, and intellectual property specialists, by using patent information provided by KIPO starting the first half of 2007. The company said that it will launch a service strategy differentiated with Naver, which had a head start in patent information search service.


Director Sung-Jun Park of Information Development Team, KIPO, commented that the cooperation between KIPO and Naver has raised the number of people using the patent information search service from an average of 13,000 to 78,000 daily (a sextuple growth in one year). He also said that the number of patent information users will increase even more due to this cooperation.