신지식재산 조사 및 성과분석

Abstract

농업부문에서 신지식재산은 명확하게 정립되진 않았지만 과학기술 및 사회의 발전에 따라 가변적인 개념으로써 품종보호, 특허, 지리적표시, 유전자원, 전통지식, 향토자원 등으로 구분할 수 있다. 최근 들어 신지식재산은 지식산업 과 생명공학 산업의 기반으로 국제적인 핫이슈로 등장하고 있음에도 불구하고 국내에서는 이를 충분히 활용치 못하는 실정이다. 현재 품종보호, 지리적표시, 전통지식, 유전자원 등 신지식재산에 대한 관심이 높아지고 있으나 국내에서는 신지식재산 분야에 대한 국가 재정 사업 및 그 성과를 파악할 수 있는 체계가 미흡하다. 이 연구는 농업 관련 신지식재산 분야의 분야별 재원배분 방향과 정책을 수립할 수 있도록 국가 개발 사업에 대한 실태조사·분석 체계 확립과 관련 자료를 확보하는 것이다.

As knowledge has emerged as an more important factor than anything else in the knowledge information society, there have been hard competition among countries for technology development related with new knowledge. As science technology has developed rapidly and social conditions have changed, new intellectual property refers to intellectual creation with economic values that do not belong to the category of existing intellectual property. Although new intellectual property is not clearly defined in agricultural sector, it includes plant variety protection, patent, geographical indications, genetic resources, traditional knowledge and local resources as a variable concept based on the development of science technology and the society. New intellectual property is a foundation for knowledge industry and bioengineering industry and although it has recently emerged as an international hot issue, it is not fully used in Korea. Public interest in new intellectual property including plant variety protection, geographical indications, traditional knowledge and genetic resources is increasing. However, Korea lacks systems to identify national budget projects and their achievements on new intellectual property. This research aims to study the current status of national development projects, establish analysis system and secure related data in order to establish the direction and policies to allocate funds for each area of agriculture-related new intellectual property. New intellectual property in agriculture includes plant variety protection, geographical indications, genetic resources and traditional knowledge. Plant variety protection is an institution to protect the rights of those who raise new varieties of plants, granting commercial exclusive rights. Geographical indications is an indication that if reputation, quality and other characteristics of agricultural good or processed good intrinsically comes from geographical features of a specific region, such goods are produced or processed in the specific region. Genetic resources means real or potentially valuable genetic materials. Genetic materials refer to materials include plants, animals, micro-organisms with genetic functional units and other materials of genetic origin. Traditional knowledge is the entire results in industry, literature, art and science fields derived from intellectual activities based on the tradition. However, there is no internationally agreed definition on it. As agriculture-related technology barriers has been raised on the background of globalization, specialization, scalization and commercialization, securing and using intellectual property is increasingly important more than ever. In particular, the enhancement of intellectual property is essential for the conservation and use of traditional knowledge such as agricultural genetic resources that are directly linked to the future strategic projects including new plant varieties. Currently, relevant research for each area is dispersed over various tasks and projects within the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. Under the circumstance, a system is required to evaluate the outcomes of agriculture-related new intellectual property, and it is needed to collect and manage achievements of each project in a systematic manner. In order to link achievements of new intellectual property in agriculture with created intellectual property rights for evaluation, an appropriate qualitative and quantitative assessment index needs to be developed in the first place, and mapping between projects and corresponding achievements needs to be clearly provided. It is desirable to ensure that assessment index includes not only the number of patent cases but also qualitative factors including commercialization and added value. On top of that, granting higher weights on the efforts to secure diversity of agricultural genetic resources is also noteworthy. The number of plant resources in Korea matches global level in terms of quantity. However, most of the resources are food crops, which indicates focus needs to be put on achievements that contribute to the resource diversity such as horticulture and special crops. In addition, more attention needs to be paid on the expansion of relatively rare native genetic resources. In the current situation where there are various research projects and the classification (IPC standard) of the output is far from clear, it is important to find ways to establish a system that links a project and achievement one by one and provide such information. Also, a research needs to be conducted on how to reflect publicness of projects when the intellectual property achievements in agriculture sector are evaluated in the frame of intellectual property rights, because in regard to the use of agricultural genetic resources, the achievements have not only a tangible and direct economic value including plant variety development and application to micro-organism industry but a significant social and environmental value including education, disease prevention, environment conservation, forestation and fish release.

Researchers: Sung, Myung-Hwan and Han, Hye-Sung Research period: 2011. 11. - 2012. 3. E-mail address: mhsung@krei.re.kr