The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a speed war! Be supported by a temporary specification!
- Submit papers and standard documents, etc. themselves to quickly file patent applications.
- LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics ranked as the first and second most frequent users.
The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) announced that as a result of implementing the temporary specification system since last year, said system is contributing to the faster filing of patent applications for inventions in fourth industrial revolution fields, with the number of monthly uses of temporary specifications having more than tripled*.
* Number of temporary specifications used: (April 2020) 227 cases → (April 2021) 730 cases (3.2 times↑)
Temporary specification system (implemented on March 30, 2020): In accordance with active administration, it is introduced to allow submission of various types of temporary documents such as PDFs, etc. without requiring the creation of an existing standardized specification before filing a patent application, and it is possible to submit a formal specification by a date one year and two months from the application date (priority date).
Before the implementation of the temporary specification system, it was widely believed that it took a long time to prepare a specification because a specification should be prepared from the beginning according to the prescribed form, and accordingly it was difficult to file an application quickly.
In particular, companies in the 5G telecommunications technology area, where preemptive securing of standard patents is important, needed a strategy to file patent applications in real time during a recent International Standardization Conference, but there was an issue in that their patent applications were being delayed due to the time needed for preparation of standard specifications.
As a result, some companies have used a strategy using the U.S. provisional application system* to quickly file applications in the U.S. and then refile them in Korea on the basis of those U.S. applications.
* (Provisional Application System) Similar to our temporary specification system, a system in which inventions are freely written down and filed as is instead of using standardized specification forms when filing a patent application.
Temporary specifications have been found to be intensively used in new digital technology fields that conform to the fourth industrial revolution, which is in line with the purpose of introducing the system.
Among all temporary specification applications, it has been shown that new digital technology area such as telecommunications (26.3%), computer technology (13.6%) and e-commerce (10.0%), in which technological changes occur quickly, accounted for half (49.9%) of the total.
As major users of the temporary specification system, LG Electronics and Samsung Electronics, which are companies involved in new digital technology fields, ranked first and second by filing 1,191 and 637 cases in the form of temporary specifications, respectively, since the implementation of the system.
LG Electronics applied for 984 cases (82.6%) in telecommunications technology alone in the form of temporary specifications, while Samsung Electronics mainly uses the temporary specification system in telecommunications (171 cases, 26.8%) and computer technology (240 cases, 37.7%).
[Source: KIPO]