EPO and KIPO heads of office strengthen ties, renew MoU
EPO President António Campinos held his first meeting with Kim Yong Rae, the new Commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office, on Friday, 30 October 2020.
During their video conference, the two heads of office reaffirmed their commitment to working together on Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) by signing a new Memorandum of Understanding covering this activity. Mr Campinos emphasised that the EPO will continue to support KIPO in increasing its expertise in CPC classification - a tool aimed at improving public access to technical information contained in patent documents which is now being actively used by 29 offices worldwide to classify their patent publications. The refined classification scheme of the CPC enables patent examiners to categorise patent documents in a more granular manner irrespective of the language in which the document is written. This subsequently allows the examiners or patent information users to retrieve documents more efficiently and effectively during searches, which contributes to the quality of the patent system.
President Campinos and Commissioner Yong Rae also spoke about the joint comparative study on computer implemented inventions which is expected to be published soon. They noted that it will help users to better adapt their patent applications in the related technology areas when cross-filing between the two jurisdictions.
Lastly, the heads of office agreed that the EPO and KIPO jointly explore possibilities for cooperation in AI-related technologies which are currently under development at the EPO and KIPO, such as machine translation and pre-classification AI tools.