In recent years, as the importance of intellectual property rights has increased, so has the number of patent disputes.
In some cases, a product or service that you have been selling for years may suddenly be deemed to infringe a third party’s patent, and you may be asked to stop manufacturing and selling the product, or even be ordered to pay damages to the patent owner based on past sales. Needless to say, once a patent infringement is found, it will be a massive blow to your business operations.
If a third party’s patent right is enforced, challenging the validity of the patent is one of the most important defensive measures. This is because if the patent is lost by the owner in a patent invalidation trial, etc., the patent infringement will be invalid and the patent right will be terminated.
Therefore, it is very important to research patent documents and other related documents that existed and were known to the public before the filing date of the said patent. In addition, we cannot ignore the importance of researching foreign patent documents or non-patent documents, which are usually not included in the research list in the normal process of patent examination, because sometimes the content of the patent in question may have been publicly known as common knowledge in some foreign documents.
Asia Patent Alliance will start a one-stop patent search service in Japan, China and Korea to prevent our clients from these problems. Of course, we are also happy to conduct searches for individual countries upon request.
Asia Patent Alliance has extensive experience and great success in filing foreign intellectual property applications in Japan, China, and South Korea.
We can also assist you in filing designs, utility models, trademarks and rights management in these countries.