Insights

As of October 1, 2025, South Korea elevated the former Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) to the Ministry of Intellectual Property (MOIP), giving intellectual property a visibly higher place in the state architecture. The point is not the new acronym. The real story is that Korea is treating intellectual property less as a back-office registration function and more as part of industrial strategy, innovation policy, and national dispute readiness.

That said, the reform should not be overstated. According to MOIP’s public FAQ, copyright matters remain under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, and MOIP does not handle copyright issues. The more accurate reading is that Korea has upgraded the institutional weight of industrial property policy and cross-government IP coordination, not that every IP-related function has been folded into one ministry.

As of April 1, 2024, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) has created a new position called “AI Advisors,” bringing in external experts to provide patent examiners with technical training and responses to inquiries on AI-related technology. This was not a stand-alone move. The JPO had already launched its Team Supporting AI Examinations in 2021 and expanded the number of AI examination experts from 13 to 39 in October 2023, effectively placing that expertise across examination offices.

The real significance lies beyond the headline. As generative AI, data-driven discovery, and materials informatics spill into conventional industries, examination quality increasingly depends on whether examiners can keep up with shifting terminology, technical architectures, and real-world use cases. By formally connecting outside academic expertise to the examination system, the JPO is signaling something important: frontier patent examination will be shaped not only by procedural efficiency, but also by the depth of technical understanding behind it.

The EUIPO’s current Trade Mark Guidelines have made the treatment of virtual goods, NFTs and metaverse-related trade mark issues much more specific. According to the Office’s public guidance pages, the version currently in force was adopted by the Executive Director on 30 April 2025 and took effect on 1 May 2025. For applicants, the important point is not the date alone. It is that examination has shifted from asking whether these filings are possible at all to asking whether they are drafted with enough precision.

This is not a cosmetic update driven by buzzwords. It is a meaningful tightening of filing boundaries. In practice, “virtual goods” on its own will often no longer be enough, and “NFTs” cannot simply be dropped into a specification as if they were a self-contained product category. What the EUIPO now wants to see is much clearer: what digital object is actually being claimed, what real-world counterpart it relates to, and whether use in metaverse settings may create a more concrete source-confusion issue with real-world goods, virtual goods or related services.

The UK conversation around bad-faith stockpiling and “zombie” marks is not just a passing enforcement headline. The verifiable public materials point to a broader tightening. After SkyKick, UKIPO told examiners to look actively at specifications that are manifestly and self-evidently broad, and from 1 April 2026 the forms and fees for revocation and invalidation have also been updated. The practical message is that the UK system is becoming less tolerant of filings built to occupy space first and justify business use later.

Across the Atlantic, the PTAB story should also be framed carefully. The current signal is not that a brand-new serial-petition final rule has already taken effect. The stronger point is that, since March 2025, the Director’s interim discretionary process has pushed serial petitions, parallel petitions and related issues into a dedicated institution-stage filter, and later guidance on prior findings has made repeat attacks on the same patent even harder to treat as routine. Different tools, same instinct: procedure is being pulled back toward bona fide dispute resolution rather than procedural warehousing or attrition.

In its 2026 revision list to the Guidelines for Examination, the EPO expressly identifies the “Abolition of PACE for search” as one of the main amendments in Part E on procedural matters. This is more than editorial housekeeping. It reflects a reordering of how acceleration is meant to work in European patent practice: for newer European filings, the EPO has for years relied on a service objective to issue the extended or partial search report within six months rather than on routine applicant-triggered PACE requests for search; it then confirmed in a formal notice published at the end of 2025 that, from 1 February 2026, the PACE mechanism is in principle confined to the examination stage.

For firms, in-house IP teams and applicants who need patent timing to support fundraising, M&A, licensing or cross-border launch planning, the key question is no longer whether to file a search PACE request as a reflex. The more important task is to identify which files do not need old-style search acceleration thinking at all, and which files still require careful orchestration through Euro-PCT entry timing, compressed procedural steps, accelerated examination or coordination with other jurisdictions. In practice, acceleration is becoming less a single formality and more a docketing and sequencing discipline.

On 1 April 2026, the European Patent Office (EPO) announced that filing in DOCX is now available to all users after a successful pilot phase. Under the accompanying news item, presidential decision and Official Journal notice, European patent applications and subsequent documents may now, in addition to existing formats such as PDF, be filed in DOCX via Online Filing 2.0 and, where applicable, via MyEPO. The change is framed as part of the EPO’s broader digital transformation and its move toward end-to-end digital processing.

The practical significance goes well beyond adding another upload option. For applicants and representatives who already draft in Word-based workflows, use template-driven automation or coordinate across multiple review teams, the wider availability of DOCX reduces friction between editable source files and formal filing versions. That can materially improve version control and document governance. At the same time, the EPO’s legal and technical texts make clear that format flexibility does not eliminate procedural risk. If anything, consistency between internal versions and the actual filed version becomes more important when the editable source file itself enters the formal filing chain.