How to Attain the International Standard

ABSTRACT

In corporate technical development strategies, how to establish international standards and how to obtain patents the quickest have taken on increased importance in recent years. This paper discusses two points: (1) What strategies are required to obtain international standards, and (2) How to go about obtaining the new type of patents which are the focus of attention in recent years (genetic patents and business method patents).

With regard to the establishment of international patents, for technologies where there is contention about defacto standards (electrical appliances and computer technology, etc.) it becomes important as to how one increases the number of companies that support the technology proposed by one's own company. The key point is to capture the market as quickly as possible, by forming consortiums and forums to recruit supporting companies. For technologies where standards are generally formulated by public organizations (telecommunications technology, etc.), it is important to secure the initiative of management of the public organization, to work on the public organization beforehand, and to increase the number of countries that support one's own country's technology. Next-generation image recorders, memory cards and information appliances belong to the former, next-generation mobile telephones and ITS belong to the former, while fuel-cell-driven motor vehicles are in between.

Meanwhile, the acquisition of new type patents has increased in the United States in recent years, but initiatives by Japanese companies are lagging way behind. Japanese companies seem at last to have recognized the importance of these patents, and are now filing patent applications. To promote the acquisition of patents in the future it is necessary to further develop and speed up the patent examination framework. However, new type patents have the property of being public goods, so there are fears that public as a whole will be disadvantaged if the rights of one company are over-protected. The examination criteria for patents have therefore become stricter recently in the United States, and the movement to shorten the term of validity for patents is gaining momentum. How best to harmonize the rights of companies with the rights of society as a whole is looming as a new problem.