- During the ‘18th Heads Meeting between KIPO and JPO’-

Commissioner Sang-Woo Jun of KIPO and Makoto Nakajima of the Japan Patent Office held the 18th Heads Meeting between KIPO and JPO in Tokyo, Japan on November 27th (Monday), 2006. During the meeting, the two commissioners agreed to launch the ‘Patent Examination Highway’ between the offices starting April 1st, 2007.


Under the ‘Patent Examination Highway,’ patent applications filed in both Korea and Japan will be eligible for expedited examination. Also, if a patent application is already registered as a patent in one of the countries, documents necessary for expedited examination application will be partially exempted for a mutual filing. This exemption is granted to simplify the application procedure and speed up the examination.


The ‘Patent Examination Highway’ will allow applicants of both countries to submit the examination result from the other country instead of submitting the ‘Comparison between the invention applied for patent and prior arts’, minimizing the costs and effort of applicants.


Before fully launching the ‘Patent Examination Highway’, both offices will establish a computerized system to allow examiners to peruse the examination results of the other office. Through this system, examiners of both offices will be able to use the examination results of the other directly, reducing the time for examination as well as improving the quality of examination.


The commissioners gave high evaluations to cooperative programs in each field, such as the cooperative prior art search, examiners’ meeting on trademark/design, and conference for information experts. They also agreed to promote continuous mutual cooperation.


In addition, they exchanged opinions on the patent cooperation roadmap among Korea, Japan, and China. They agreed to systematically promote patent cooperation among the three countries based on the roadmap.

<Reference> History of ‘Patent Examination Highway’

During the ‘17th Heads Meeting’ between KIPO and JPO on November 30th, 2005, commissioners from both offices decided on a mutual agreement for a ‘Patent Examination Highway’ between the offices.


Based on the agreement, KIPO included patent applications initially filed in Japan and then filed in Korea with certain documentary evidences attached, as subject for expedited examination by revising the ‘Regulations for Patent Act’ and the ‘Notice for applying expedited examination’ in September, 2006. The revisions bacame effective on October 1st, 2006.


Currently, Korea and Japan are providing expedited examination for patent applications filed in both countries. To receive the expedited examinations, applicants must submit Report on prior art search, copy of the prior arts, and comparison between the invention applied for patent and the prior arts.


After April 1st, 2007 when the ‘Patent Examination Highway’ is fully launched, applicants will be exempted from submitting the comparison report if the invention is registered as a patent in one of the offices, and if the claims of the patent application are the same in both offices. Instead, they should submit only the copy and translation documents for the claims of patent registered in the other country, as well as all related documents and translations concerning the patent examination of the registered country.