earticle

영어

The Patent Act provides that certain patent fees charged by the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) shall be reduced by 50 percent for any small entity and any independent inventor and so on. The purpose of this statute is to make obtaining and maintaining a patent less costly for those entities presumably least able to bear those costs. The ability to procure patent protection allows small companies to grow and compete in the marketplace. Therefore, it is important to make this protection available to these entities. However, unfortunately, this reduction system is not established reasonably at the beginning and necessary qualifications for this special status are not always clear and it causes the whole patent fee system to be complex. Further, the subjects and the objects of fee reduction are not coherent and constant. Their status may sometimes be used in ways with bad faith. Of similar concern is what happens when a foreign applicant claims small entity status and how treats it considering national treatment principles. This article discusses these problems of current fee reduction system such as the requisite qualifications for consideration, the subjects and the objects of fee reduction with a comparative perspective through examining the related reduction system of foreign countries such as USA, EPO, Japan and Germany. This article further suggests the desirable directions of current fee reduction system to be revised in the future.