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Korea earned more than US$2 billion by licensing patented technology to other countries last year, up 5.4 percentage points from 2005, the Bank of Korea said on Monday. That's a ten-fold increase in royalty income over the past 10 years, from US$180 million in 1996. Meanwhile, patent royalties paid by Korea to other countries decreased, from US$4.56 billion in 1995 to US$4.49 billion in 2006. The figures show that Korean companies are increasingly developing and patenting their own technologies, a shift from the past when they relied on patented overseas technologies.
According to the World Intellectual Property Organization in Switzerland, Korea filed 5,935 international patent applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) last year, making it the world¡¯s fourth leading country of origin for PCT filings, surpassing the United Kingdom and France. Korea¡¯s applications rose by 26.6 percent from 2005, and its ranking in international patent applications has risen continually, from seventh in 2004 to sixth in 2005.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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