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Rapidly Changing Intellectual Property Laws of Korea

RA Lea Chang

Although Intellectual Property Law of Korea is not well known in Japan, exchanges between Japan and Korea in the IP field seem to grow rapidly such as cross-license agreements between Japanese companies and Korean companies. I would like to introduce IP Laws of Korea briefly, which have been revised one after another recently in the Republic of Korea.

First, "the Design Protection Law (former Design Law)" and "the Revised Korean Trademark Law" were announced on December 31, 2004 and became effective on July 1, 2005.

The revision of "the Design Protection Law" intended to improve the system of design protection innovatively in the digital age. Image designs had already become subject to protection by the Revised Design Examination Guideline from July 1, 2003. In addition to that, font or typeface design become subject to protection by this recent revision. That means the design law that had only protected product design traditionally has come to include a part of visual designs in its protection. It can be regarded as a remarkable improvement.

Furthermore, under the previous trademark law, the trademarks consisting solely of geographical name could not be registered. However, under the Revised Trademark Law, the marks consisting solely of a well-known geographical name may now be registered if the mark has acquired distinctiveness as the well-known regional products and the application is filed by the regional producer organization as "regional group trademark". Through promoting the consumption of distinctive regional specialties, it is expected to facilitate the development of local economies which have been suffering from agricultural market opening. Also, in Japan, the system of regional group trademark was introduced by "the law amending a part of the trademark law"（announced on June 15, 2005, effective on April 1, 2006）.

On the other hand, "the Revision of a Part of the Patent Law" and "The Revision of the Utility Model Law" announced on April 29, 2005 include revisions to change the current system vastly.

Especially, the utility model system that currently has no examination procedure will turn into the system with the examination procedure by this revision. This amendment will eliminate the double application system of both patent and utility model and reestablish the correction system, instead. In addition, this revision announced many changes throughout Korean Patent system including the expansion of the scope of shared implementation from domestic to international. Related industries in Japan should also pay attention to these changes and that is why I bring this topic for this column.