EPO President meets the Commissioner of the Korean Patent Office

Today, EPO President António Campinos met online
with Dr Kim
Yong Rae, Commissioner of the Korean Patent Office (KIPO). Mr Campinos
and Dr Kim took stock of the fruitful collaboration between the two offices and
launched the first EPO-KIPO study, a comparative study on computer-implemented inventions
(CIIs). The publication aims to provide applicants and
practitioners with clear and useful insights into each office’s examination
practices in this rapidly growing area.

The
study first outlines and compares the respective approaches
to examining CIIs. It then focuses on ten example cases that have been analysed
in parallel by experts from the EPO and KIPO. These examples were carefully
selected by both offices to reflect the range of CIIs for which patent
applications are often filed. The cases therefore span
areas such as artificial intelligence, graphical user interfaces, speech processing,
e-commerce and telecommunications.

As shown in the study, the EPO and KIPO use overlapping
yet different sets of criteria to assess the patentability of CIIs. In
practice, this leads to outcomes which are largely comparable, but not always
completely aligned. Therefore, when drafting CII-related patent applications,
applicants and practitioners may benefit from taking into consideration the two offices‘
different approaches.

The EPO will host the
annual meeting of the heads of the world’s five largest IP offices (IP5) in
June 2022. In the run up to the meeting, the EPO and KIPO agreed to co-operate closely
on raising awareness of the benefits of IP, with a view to building a
sustainable economic recovery and drawing attention to the positive
contributions that fostering and protecting innovation can make to achieving
the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.