JAPAN, CHINA AND S. KOREA START TALKS ON PATENT HARMONIZATION: Not waiting for WIPO, South Korea, Japan and China are pushing to unify their industrial property rights systems by comprising industrial patents, designs and trade marks, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun said Sunday. The Japanese paper said the three countries will soon begin working-level talks to discuss unification of their patent systems, as well as ways to simplify their patent application procedures.