IP5 Announce Plans for Work-sharing

03 December 2012

After a two-day meeting in Jeju, Korea, the heads of five IP offices (IP5) announced work-sharing plans which should reduce unnecessary duplication of work among the offices, according to a statement issued after the meeting.

The meeting was chaired by Jung-Sik Koh, commissioner of the Korea Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) and attended by Alison Brimelow, president of the European Patent Office (EPO), Takashi Suzuki, commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Tian Lipu, commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office of the People’s Republic of China (SIPO) and Jon Dudas, Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

According to a release issued following the meeting, the heads of the five offices “recognise the trend toward greater globalisation and seek to minimise the resultant redundancy of patent searches and examinations, share a concern for the growing number of pending patent applications and the prolonged pendency period [and] acknowledge that delays in granting patents hinder the promotion of innovation.”

According to statistics released by the IP5, the number of applications filed at two or more of the IP5 offices currently stands at up to 250,000 per year, meaning reutilisation of the work of another office for these duplicate applications canlead to significant improvements in patent examination efficiency for all IP5 offices.

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