Wait, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't patents only valid in the country they are filed in? So to be able to enforce a patent, you'd need to have filed in the US, Europe and China(?). Also patents take a couple of years to get accepted...
Filing in juridictions worldwide is a routine process when you apply for an important patent. Any respectable patent lawyer should be able to deal with it.
But you have to choose to do it and there is an additional cost, if I am not mistaken. When our startup filed our patents in the US market, we chose not to do the same in Europe...
Sure, and most large corporations with worldwide influence do it automatically.
The last action one of my previous employers took was to send me payments for a patent I'm named on when they filed it in the EU. I had already quit, but it was easier to just send me the check than to cancel it :-)
Good point about that! Obviously there are alot of big players like that. However I heard this was a small lab, so I guess we don't know yet what their patenting power is.
As far as I know, there is no such thing as an international patent.
What is called an international patent is just a standardized application so that only one national patent office has to examine it. If it is accepted, other national offices will grant the patent much more easily since the hard work has already been done.
And here, there is an international application, so what I think is that there is already a patent in Korea, but it is still pending for other countries.