Three new Projects of the Department of Intellectual Property for “SMART DIP”

The Director General of the Department of Intellectual Property (“DIP”) has recently announced three new projects of the DIP under the scheme of “SMART DIP” in order to improve its services in response to the growing trends of the digital economy.

The three new projects of “SMART DIP” consist of:

• E-Certificate Project;
• Online Dispute Resolution Project; and
• Patent Big Data Analysis Project.

For the E-Certificate Project, the Director General of the DIP stated that all registration certificates will be issued electronically under this project, instead of by hard copy.  Once the e-certificate system is fully in use, issuance of a registration certificate should be done within 15 days from the date of registration approval and payment of the registration fee.  The e-certificate system is planned to be implemented for patent registrations in January 2021 and is expected to be available for trademark registrations in approximately March 2021.

The second project is the Online Dispute Resolution Project, which falls under the Settlement Division of the DIP.  This project aims to adopt an online system in order to help with dispute resolution procedures, e.g. an online meeting schedule system and video calls for meetings, negotiations, and mediation.  For this project, the DIP is in cooperation with the Thailand Arbitration Center (“THAC”) in developing and implementing the online system for dispute resolutions.  This online system is expected to be available in the beginning of 2021.

Regarding the Patent Big Data Analysis Project, it is said that the DIP has been in the process of analysing the patent data both domestically and globally. In such regard, they will publish their analysis of technology trends which will be useful and beneficial for the development of technology in Thailand.  In addition, the DIP will also gather and publish information on patents which are near to expiration in order to help enhance and encourage further development and inventions using knowledge from such expired patents.