Trio of countries strengthen IP ties

China's national intellectual property authority will continue cooperating with its Japanese and South Korean peers to help residents of all three countries benefit from innovation and creation, said Shen Changyu, commissioner of the State Intellectual Property Office.  

He made the remarks at the 15th trilateral policy dialogue meeting among SIPO, the Japan Patent Office and the Korean Intellectual Property Office on Nov 17 in Guang-zhou. 

The three IP offices are among the world's five largest and have "a broad influence", Shen said. 

He said events co-hosted by the three organizations over the past year, including trilateral patent examination experts meetings and design forums, have boosted the development of innovation in their own countries and trilateral exchanges on commerce, science and technology and culture. 

The three offices announced the launch of a new version of their IP cooperation website tripo.org on the same day. 

The previous English-language website now also provides content in Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It is a further achievement of the cooperation by the three IP authorities, Shen said. 

Tripo.org will provide public users with more information on the three countries' IP laws and regulations and services, including searches for patent documentation. 

Choi Donggyou, commissioner of KIPO, said at a meeting with Shen on Nov 16, "The relationship between China and South Korea is in its best times. Cooperation between SIPO and KIPO is a model of bilateral cooperation on IP across the world." 

He said China's IP has boomed in recent years and KIPO hopes to further develop its friendly partnership with SIPO to add impetus to economic development in both countries. 

Shen said there are many South Korea-invested companies in China and they have made a positive contribution to China's economic development. SIPO is pleased to create a sound IP environment for domestic and foreign companies including South Korea-funded ones, he added. 

SIPO and KIPO signed a memorandum of understanding related to exchanges of IP information and data at the bilateral meeting.
Hitoshi Ito, JPO commissioner, said at a Sino-Japanese IP chief meeting that cooperation between SIPO and JPO "has a long history and huge potential". 

He said JPO hopes the two IP organizations will share their latest IP-related advances through exchanges to benefit bilateral IP holders. 

The Chinese and Japanese IP chiefs also discussed the Sino-Japanese Patent Prosecution Highway project, which aims to provide accelerated patent examination procedures by sharing information between participating patent offices, and cooperation on patent documentation classification and design fields. 

JPO is the first IP management organization to establish a PPH project with SIPO, according to SIPO's website. The two offices also planned their cooperation projects for next year at the meeting. 

SIPO, JPO and KIPO held the first talks among their heads in 2001 in Tokyo, where they set up the mechanism of the policy dialogue meeting among the three offices. 

The three partners for the first time examined and passed a trilateral cooperation roadmap at their seventh meeting in 2007, and determined their mid-term and long-term goals. 

Their next policy dialogue meeting will take place in Japan in 2016.