The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) under the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE) announced on the 5 of February that they plan to push a support strategy to cope with royalty payments caused by patent infringement which is in line with international standards. This strategy will be promoted by connecting homegrown original technologies in the IT field to standard patents. This is designed to solve a chronic deficit of technology trade balance.
Korea is fourth place globally in the number of patent applications filed per year. However, according to the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), our nation only exported US$2.2 billion worth of technology in 2007, while importing US$5.1 billion, in 2007.
The proportion of patented technologies among the total technologies imported came to 43 percent and cost US$2.2 billion. This is especially expensive in our IT industry growth, where royalty payments for original technologies have weighed down the industry.
KATS insisted: “According to our analysis, there are about 29 thousand international standards contained in 4,640 patents in the patent database of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), so, we need a strategy to link R&D and standard patents.”
KATS planned to figure out the amount of demand for standard patents and then reflect its results in R&D projects first. It then plans to link the fruits of R&D with standard development to secure standard patents by making international standardization activities conducted by the government and private sector.
KATS will also examine universities, institutes, and smaller companies which are related to IT to see whether they have technologies which can become to international standards. If the possibility is there, KATS will help them to get standard patents.
KATS said: “We plan to invest about 2 billion won to base-building for creating standard patents for five years. We will build infrastructure to connect core technologies made by our small and medium venture companies, universities, and institutes to standard patents.”
