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.

ONE PORTAL DOSSIER: 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.

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.

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.

Source: http://nwww.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20140608000175