1. Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) has started electronic payment services for official fees
KIPO announced that the electronic payment services for official fees have started. Accordingly, people can conveniently pay the patent-related official fees at KIPO’s homepage (www.kipo.go.kr) for 24 hours, through credit cards, real-time banking transfer, visual account, mobile phones, ARS and the like, without visiting banks or connecting to any other internet fee payment sites.
There is no additional fee for using the system. A document certifying the result of the official fee payment is available. Further, when a person directly visits to the Seoul office or the patent customer service center at the Deajun Government Building of KIPO, to submit the patent-related documents, it is possible to pay the involved office fees by a credit card.
2. About 26,000 illegal copy products are disclosed during the first week since the control of illegal reproduction has started
According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the copyright protection center of the Korea Federation of Copyright Organizations, 26,443 illegally produced DVD, CD and the like were disclosed and collected during the first week of the ‘Seoul Clean 100-Day Project’, which started on April 14, 2008.
As the incentive control performed throughout Seoul to stamp out the illegal copy products, the ‘Seoul Clean 100-Day Project’ will continue to July 22, 2008.
The Ministry of Culture, in cooperation with the prosecution and the police, plans to inflict heavy punishment on those who distribute illegal copy products in large quantities.
3. Seoul Semiconductor concluded a patent license with a US inventor
On April 8, 2008, Seoul Semiconductor announced that they concluded a patent license with Prof. Rothschild, an inventor from the U.S.A.
Prof. Rothschild, who retired the Columbia University of the U.S.A., has filed a suit with the US International Trade Commission (US ITC), against 34 electronic companies of the world.
The patent subject to the patent license relates to a process for fabricating a chip of an LED used as a mobile device or an LCD backlight and fabricating a chip of a laser diode chip used for a blue-ray player.
A spokesman of Seoul Semiconductor said, “as the patent license has been concluded, the company [Seoul Semiconductor] can more stably sell LED products in the US market in the future” and the company improves the level of satisfaction of customers purchasing the products of Seoul Semiconductor.”
Meanwhile, Seoul Semiconductor has entered into the licenses and strategic partnerships with universities, research institutions and companies. At present, Seoul Semiconductor has filed and/or registered a total of about 2000 patent applications and patents in the major advanced countries.
4. POSCO strengthens its intellectual property (IP) rights
POSCO starts the strategic and systematical control of IP rights, for the protection of the source techniques held by POSCO and for the safe and free management of the patents.
It is announced that POSCO would complement and improve the weak points of its IP right control methods, to cope with the situation that a competitor aggressively uses a patent right regarding the steel-related source techniques.
For these purposes, POSCO built a processor capable of systemically using the patent information. This processing system searches published patent applications/patents filed/registered by foreign steel companies and laboratories as well as Korean ones, extracts the steel-related applications/patents from the searched data, sorts the extracted data by research fields and techniques, and analyzes the relevancy to POSCO based on the sorted data.
Further, the system includes a patent competitiveness numerical index which was developed to be used to evaluate the relative competitiveness of a pertinent technique, considering the quantitative, qualitative and future factors of a patent. Therefore, the system is capable of more objectively analyzing the patent competitiveness of products and processes.
POSCO thoroughly analyzes the patent portfolio so that in the weak fields, a plan is established to prevent any patent conflicts with foreign competitors and in the strong field, a plan is established to use the strong field for checking steel companies getting into business late.
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