Patent Directors' Meeting of China, America, Japan, Korea and Europe held

The five patent offices of China, America, Europe, Japan and Korea have 80% of the patent applications in the world; this is learnt from the third Directors' Meeting of China State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), European Patent Office (EPO), Japan Patent Office (JPO) and Korea Intellectual Property Office (KIPO).

Commissioner of SIPO Tian Lipu attended and presided the meeting, WIPO Director General Francis Gurry attended the meeting as an observer.

Along with the economic globalization, the world's patent applications are increasing continuously. According to the statistics of WIPO, The five patent offices of China, America, Europe, Japan and Korea have 80% of the patent applications in the world, and the five offices are facing the challenge of the dramatic increase of work and backlog of patents pending files. In order to avoid the unnecessary work among the five offices and strengthen the efficiency and quality of patent examination, the five offices planned to carry out patent examination operation in 2007.

The two-day meeting will hear the reports on the cooperationamong the five offices during the previous phase, and hold discussions on the next step's work. Director of EPO Alison Brimelow, Commissioner of JPO Tetsuhiro Hosono, Commissioner of KIPO Jung-Sik Koh and Director of USPTO David Kappos attended the meeting.

This the third session of the five offices' meeting, the previous two sessions were respectively held in May 2007 and October 2008 in Hawaii of US and Cheju Island of Korea. [Chinese version is available on SIPO.gov.cn]