Japan Patent Office or more popularly known as JPO is the world’s most efficient office with fastest examination system. It has been successful in accelerating the patent examination and has achieved FA 11 status which means having First Action Pendency of just 10.4 months at the end of March 2014 within a short span of five years from 29.3 months in 2008. This challenge has been met through a process of outsourcing the prior art search from outside efficient firms and also through a very transparent policy of secure, wide and useful patent rights. The efficiency level can be understood from the fact that the first action per examiner was 234 per year in JPO as against 82 in USPTO and 52 at EPO in the year 2013.

Japan has an Intellectual Property Basic Act apart from different statute like Patent Act, Trade Mark Act etc. which is very common in all jurisdictions. The aim of this Act is to develop on continuous basis a robust intellectual property strategic program under the guidance and support of the Prime Minister with the involvement of his cabinet colleagues from Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, JPO, Custom and other Ministries and agencies. It has defined contents to establish a national target for revitalizing the cycle of intellectual creation and a concrete action plan to promote creation of intellectual property and strengthen protection of IP,utilization of IP and improvement of human resource.

Japan is now facing certain challenges due to change that has taken place in the patenting of technology which is different from the time the industrial revolution took place. The technological changes are largely due to shift from tangible asset creation to creation of intangible asset under the modern age of information and communication based technology or ICT. There is increasing number of companies who are now involved in technology development activities in the form of information goods such as software or in mobile phone technology in telecom or communication based goods. The goal of Japan is to become an intellectual property based nation but somehow the there is some decline in momentum which is visible in decline in number of patent applications in 2015 which was 318721, down 2.2% from the previous year and there is a visible decline since 2006.

In the new technology world, the role of investment in land, labour or capital based resources are being replaced by human based intellectual resources and with the globalization the geographical boundaries are also becoming irrelevant and many Japanese companies are also shifting their research work to other places near to market or due to certain other factors. The third challenge in change in the philosophy as the linear model has lost its significance. Many of the successful companies such as Intel or Sun Microsystems do not have a research institute. The new model is known as chain-linked model, where research includes such activities as carrying out detailed surveys on consumer needs, procuring necessary funds, and having discussions with experts in a variety of fields. Technology development activities performed based on such chain linked model has given birth to companies like UBER and Face book, Amazon and Google causing a dramatic increase in the number of applications at the global level. The cumulative effect of such changes in the technology area and the business model the traditional form of inventions which are generally limited in numbers find it difficult to keep pace with the modern and changing pattern of patent culture. In order to cope with the situation and to overcome the risk of infringing others’ patent the companies are resorting to patent pools as there are too much overlap of the technology.

The second risk is the risk of losing the patent rights. The patent right is inherently a very unstable as there is always a risk of some invalidation challenge post grant of a patent because of the limitation in examination of the prior art. In view of all the challenges the future of the Patent is becoming very uncertain and there seems to be a need of some new patent system where the genuine invention can have more stability and a large number of frivolous inventions or the patents filed by the NPEs or the non-working parents can be reduced from the patent system. However, despite the challenges the JPO has a very effective and efficient system of prior art searches by using a database that contains around 70 million Japanese documents accumulated since the Meiji era and the database of USPTO and the EPO to cover the foreign documents mostly written in English. The principles of absolute novelty keeps the chances of a patent being held invalid by Courts, very high which is about 60 percent despite their being strong process of examination and trial procedure at the JPO.

In conclusion, it can be said with an optimistic note that the awareness level on IPR is increasing at global level. The number of member countries at Paris convention has increased to 171 and the number of WTO members has also increased to 161. The member countries are continuously engaged in negotiation and discussion through bilateral and multilateral agreements to reduce the ambiguities and to keep the process of globalization moving without any hurdles and obstruction for the increasing level of economic activities through international trade and investment. The global IP Ecosystem needs to have more harmonious approach in IPR laws and international exhaustion of IPR will play a very important role in mutual cooperation in years to come in the long term public interest.