국제적 특허업무 공조를 위한 협력과 전망

General perception and awareness of patent has been improved worldwide as we have moved to an intellectual property based economy. Companies exploit the patent to raise their industrial competitiveness by securing an exclusive position in the market. This would lead to an increase in the number of patent applications and many countries are experiencing a growing backlog in its inspection due to duplicate applications. The Intellectual Property Office in each country takes following actions to respond to the increasing patent application. First, there are discussions on harmonization of the patent law of each individual country. Also, countries are coping with the increased application at the practice level as well. Domestically, hiring more inspectors or performing a prior technology examination through service organization and internationally, allotting the work of duplicate applications. We may overcome the backlog of inspection by running programs such as SHARE, PPH, the UPP, and New Route at each stage of the application and enhance the quality of the patent by harmonizing the each country’s inspection process. Our Intellectual Property Office as one of the global patent application country, is establishing a cooperative mechanism with Trilateral Cooperation and Five IP Offices. This paper investigates the recent aspects of regional and bilateral patent cooperation and explores the benefits and advantages of the following work-sharing mechanisms: the PPH, PPH2.0, SHARE, the UPP, Triway, New Route, and Mottainai. In addition, the paper examines and compares the features of two other interoffice cooperative schemes set up for mutual exploitation of examination results: namely the ASEAN Patent Examination Co-operation and the Vancouver Group Offices.