Posts in Korea

A single alphabet letter mark may face a bigger challenge in some jurisdictions than others. Take the example of Prince Sports International Company Ltd.’s stylized letter “P”. The Korean Trademark Act prevents registration of “a trademark that consists solely of a simple and common mark” under Article 33(1)(6). Prince Sports International Company Ltd., a Hong Kong-based company that manufactures sports goods, sought to register “P” as its trademark for jewelry, computers, online shopping mall businesses, etc. in Korea. It had already registered the same mark in the United States, Australia, and China, among other countries. In the United States, it is registered as Prince Sports, Inc.’s stylized word mark for tennis rackets. However, the Korean IP Office (KIPO) examiner rejected the application under the Korean Trademark Act, Article 33(1)(6)(a trademark that consists solely of a simple and common mark may not be registered) and Article 33(1) (7)(nondistinctive trademarks that do not serve as a source identifier for other reasons are also unregistrable).

U.S. patent grants grew by 15% from 2018 to 2019, with IBM heading the pack for the 27th consecutive year, according to IFI CLAIMS Patent Services’ 2019 report. There were 333,530 U.S. patents granted last year, compared with 288,832 in 2018, which represented a 3.5% decline from 20I7. IFI said the growth could possibly be attributed to examiner clarity on patent eligibility following the USPTO’s guidance on Alice, as illustrated in IPWatchdog’s article by Kate Gaudry last year.

A patent maintenance fee is an official fee that is payable at prescribed intervals to a national patent office over the lifecycle of a patent application or a granted patent, in order to keep the patent application or the granted patent in force in that particular jurisdiction. It is payable by an applicant or a patent owner (an assignee or a patentee, as the case may be). Patent maintenance fees are an integral part of the patenting process and may also be referred to as patent annuities, patent annuity fees, patent renewal fees, or patent annual fees. The failure to pay a patent maintenance fee could have serious and far-reaching consequences, including the patent application or the granted patent being treated as lapsed, withdrawn, or abandoned in that particular jurisdiction. In this article, we will delve into the patent maintenance fees in the jurisdictions in which the payment of said fees begins at the patent grant stage or patent issue stage, or are calculated from the date on which a patent is issued or granted.

Each year the World Intellectual Property Organization releases a report titled World Intellectual Property Indicators. The latest edition of the report, the 2019 version, is a look back on the filing statistics for 2018. The report is eye-opening and should be mandatory reading for policy makers and legislators in the United States. For the first time since 2009, the United States saw a decline in the number of patent applications filed. This remarkable statistic comes at a time when patent applications are growing in number across the rest of the world. And let’s not forget that 2009 was a time of particular economic crisis both in the United States and around the world due to the global financial crisis and Wall Street meltdown brought on by the housing market collapse.  

Today, blockchain projects are proceeding in nearly every major industry and occur in more than 140 countries. According to blockchain IP landscape research by Perception Partners, over the past three years, the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of patent families publishing in the United States, Europe, Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), China, Japan and Korea is about 23%. The space has more than 13,000 global competitors of every size with nearly 23,000 inventors or authors disclosing or researching blockchain innovations. Much has been written about Bitcoin and blockchain technology, including a prior article in which we provided an overview on “The Bitcoin Network, Blockchain Technology and Altcoin Futures.”  To keep pace with the evolving nature of blockchain intellectual property and technology, below we provide some sample use cases of how blockchain innovations are already being leveraged in commerce and likely to be exploited in the near future.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the Chinese government announces stricter punitive measures in its IP system; the Federal Circuit says state sovereignty principles do not allow the University of Texas to bring suit in an otherwise improper venue; Congressional leadership asks Google to expand copyright protections under its Content ID tool; Google and Facebook to face antitrust probes from state AGs; George Mason University to create an Innovation Law Clinic; Ariana Grande files a copyright and trademark infringement suit against Forever 21; the Hudson Institute publishes a report on China’s 5G developments; and South Korea’s government has reportedly been collecting copyright payments for use of North Korean TV broadcasts.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the USPTO’s Precedential Opinion Panel delivers a key ruling for inventors; the Second Circuit rules that a series of six film scores weren’t works for hire under U.S. or Italian law; Gilead files for inter partes review of patents owned by the U.S. government covering PrEP treatments; Qualcomm and LG Electronics enter into a five-year patent licensing agreement for wireless technologies; Taiwan begins implementing a patent linkage system for drug approvals; HP appoints a new CEO; Eminem music publishing firm files a copyright infringement suit against Spotify; and the DOJ and the Copyright Office support Led Zeppelin in the “Stairway to Heaven” copyright case.

Most U.S. patent practitioners are keenly aware of the foreign filing license requirement for filing of U.S. patent applications abroad. Since it is common for U.S. based companies to file a U.S. priority patent application and take advantage of the one-year grace period for foreign filing, a foreign filing license is typically issued without much thought to the matter. Given the propensity for international companies and many universities to routinely carry out inventive activities in multiple countries by inventors of varied citizenships, the opportunities to run afoul of foreign filing license requirements is of growing concern, and this concern extends well beyond the walls of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

In a June 4 op-ed to IPWatchDog, James Edwards launched a scathing attack against Judge Koh and her 233-page ruling, which found Qualcomm to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior against competitors within the cellular chipset market. However, just as Mr. Edwards claims Judge Koh failed in her undertaking, so too has Mr. Edwards by ignoring the context and facts of the case. His argument against Judge Koh, deliberately or otherwise, does not mention the fact that this case involved the licensing of standard essential patents (SEPs) subject to the FRAND commitment, a contract between the patent holder and the standard setting organization to license the relevant patents on “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory” terms. Indeed, Mr. Edwards makes no mention of standard essential patents in a deliberate attempt to obfuscate the facts and fit a narrative that intellectual property rights writ large are under attack by this decision.

Over the course of two weeks, the United States has imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods and has blacklisted Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications company, on national security grounds. Google, Intel, Qualcomm and Micron have announced that they will stop doing business with the company. The United States has even threatened to withhold intelligence from our key allies if they go forward with plans to use Huawei equipment. Although there are many issues driving this newly escalated trade war between the United States and China, chief among them is the concern that China and its companies are engaged in intellectual property theft. Say what? Upend global markets over infringement of private technology rights? This must be pretty serious. Let’s take a closer look.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: Chinese state political advisors suggest changes to the country’s copyright law, including stronger punitive measures for infringement; President Donald Trump bans Huawei telecommunications equipment from use on U.S. networks; Korean IP offices get ready to study inter-Korean IP cooperation; Huawei and Samsung reach a conclusion to their worldwide patent litigation; AbbVie okays a generic Humira treatment in 2023; Disney escapes Pirates of the Caribbean copyright suit unscathed; Guns N’ Roses files a trademark suit over a beer; Qualcomm enters into another worldwide patent license for 5G technology; and Procter & Gamble unveils its largest research and development center after $400 million upgrade to Ohio facility.

Yesterday, we looked at trends in the medical device industry. Today’s article pertains to Industrial Design, which was limited to design patent protection. The term of a design patent is 15 years from filing in contrast with 20 years from issuance for utility patents that are the subject of the 11 other industry areas of this study. Submarine patents are still possible in the design area. Unlike utility applications, nearly all design patents are allowed with a 99% success rate in recent years. This near perfect yield for filings coupled with costs that are about 10% of a utility patent with no maintenance fees contributes to the wild popularity of design patent protection. Our study not only identified a set of applications that pertained to this industry, but also—for each application in this set—we determined whether the application pertained to one or more of the categories shown in the topology below. If so, the application was appropriately tagged, such that it could be included in one or more category-specific data subsets for subsequent analysis.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) established World IP Day (WIPD) 19 years ago to celebrate the day on which the WIPO Convention entered into force: April 26, 1970. With nearly five decades under its belt, WIPO has had its successes and scandals, but there can be no doubt that IP rights are more harmonized now than ever before. This year’s WIPD theme is “Reach for Gold: IP and Sports.” While the topic may seem slightly off-mark to some, with so much else to talk about in the context of a rapidly-evolving global digital economy in which IP rights are becoming both more crucial and increasingly threatened in many jurisdictions, it does underscore the degree to which IP permeates industries and facilitates consumer experiences.In honor of World IP Day, we asked the experts to weigh in on how far we’ve come in the two decades since the holiday was established, and what the future holds. As usual, there were optimists, pessimists, and those in between. Here’s what they had to say.

On February 7, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Innovation Policy Center (GIPC) released the latest version of its International IP Index assessing the intellectual property environments in 50 world economies. Once again, the United States achieved the top overall ranking as the strongest intellectual property regime in the world. The country’s improved ranking in patent rights—moving from its twelfth-place ranking in 2018 to a tie for second place this year—is particularly notable. However, the United States does find itself tied with 10 other countries for that second-place ranking in patent rights and is just as close to being tied with thirteenth-place Italy as it is to being tied with first-place Singapore.

Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) are patents that are unavoidable for the implementation of a standardized technology. They represent core, pioneering innovation that entire industries will build upon. These patents protect innovation that has taken extraordinary effort to achieve. Standard Development Organizations (SDOs) exist as a mechanism for industry innovators to work together to collectively identify and select the best and most promising innovations that will become the foundation for the entire industry to build upon for years to come. Those contributing patented technologies to the development of a standard are asked to provide a FRAND (which stands for Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) assurance, in essence committing to providing access to patents that are or may become essential to the implementation of the standard.