[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Seon-gang] As consumer damage continues due to fraudulent patent proxy applications by unqualified individuals lacking expertise, as well as false and exaggerated appraisals and consultations, legislation to regulate this is being promoted.
On the 27th, Shin Jeong-hoon, a member of the National Assembly's Industry, Trade, Energy, and Small and Medium Venture Business Committee (Jeonnam Naju·Hwasun, Democratic Party), announced that on the 26th he introduced a bill titled the "Patent Market Disruption Prevention Act" (an amendment to the Patent Attorney Act) to establish grounds for punishing acts of non-patent attorneys who receive or promise to receive money or other compensation in exchange for appraisals related to industrial property rights or for consulting and mediation for overseas applications.
Earlier, during the October National Assembly audit, Representative Shin Jeong-hoon uncovered that consulting firms that did not actually participate in inventions used various fraudulent methods such as joint invention and joint application to proxy file industrial property rights or excessively filed so-called "empty patents" with significantly low registration rates, thereby disrupting the patent market.
Therefore, patent experts and the industry have raised the need for regulations to prevent this.
Representative Shin Jeong-hoon stated, "Many cases occur where small and medium enterprises lacking specialized knowledge entrust consulting firms without official qualifications with appraisals related to industrial property rights, receive inaccurate information from them, suffer economic losses, or are led to fraudulent proxy applications, disrupting the patent market. To prevent damage to SMEs and consumers, it is urgent to introduce a system to curb the reckless proliferation of unqualified consulting."
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