The heads of the world’s top five intellectual property offices confirmed the time frame for opening up the One Portal Dossier to the public during their annual conference held in Busan last week.

The meeting, held for the first time in South Korea in six years, was a follow-up to a conference in June 2013 when intellectual property offices including the Korean Intellectual Property Office agreed to the principle of making the OPD more accessible for the public.

The OPD is a website where patent examiners can freely share patent applications and other relevant information of patent offices in top patent-filing regions ― Korea, Japan, China, the U.S. and Europe.

“When the OPD is opened to the public, patent applicants will be able to more conveniently check patent file wrapper information at overseas intellectual property offices,” said Kwon Oh-jung, director general of the Intellectual Property Protection and International Cooperation Bureau of the Korean Intellectual Property Office. 

A patent file wrapper is a written record that contains all of the documents pertaining to a particular patent application. This information can be crucial in case of a lawsuit over patent infringement as it can be used to demonstrate the nature of the invention, the precise time that the patent was requested and granted, and also the scope of the patent.

So far, when people want to see file wrappers of a patent family ― a set of patents taken in multiple countries to protect a single invention ― they had to separately access each country’s patent office.

This will change in the near future so that they can simply check the information of each country via the OPD, owing to the progress made at the recent IPO meeting.

The European Patent Office this month will be the first to open up its OPD, followed by the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the State Intellectual Property Office of People’s Republic of China and the United States Patent and Trademark Office next year. The Japan Patent Office will offer the service by 2016, according to officials who participated in the Busan conference.

The move to open up the OPD is all a part of the IP5’s efforts to promote the Global Dossier, which aims to provide all stakeholders with secure, one-stop access to their related applications across the IP5.

In March 2011, the IP5 decided to open the OPD to patent examiners, allowing them to view the examination progress of family applications at the five IP offices. The examiners were previously saddled with the inconvenience of having to access information from each patent office separately.

“If all goes as planned, companies will have easier access to diverse patent information including file wrapper in overseas patent offices,” said Kim Young-min, commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office.

The IPOs this year worked mainly on offering wider accessibility to patent information, and on streamlining patent application procedures.

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)