New Amendments to Korean Acts from April 2022

To adapt to the ongoing changes in Korean society, the Korean Government has introduced new Amendments to Korean Acts from April 2022. These amendments will likely improve the IP system in a way to facilitates the rights holders to protect their rights. 

Previous to the Covid-19 pandemic, when the non-extensible deadline lapses, it was hard for the rights holders to reinstate a proceeding or a right unless there was an excuse for “force majeure” to the extent of “war” or “earthquake”.

As we can see, those excuses won’t likely happen and even if they did, it won’t likely fall on the head of the rights holders. 

Accordingly, in those cases, the rights holders had not been entitled to such restoration.

However, since the Covid-19 starts, there are many cases in which the deadline has been missed due to forced quarantine orders from the government. However, does the pandemic count as “war” or “earthquake”? Quite not!

Accordingly, to meet the demand of the market, there must be a change in the Korean Acts revolving around this matter in order to lower the standards.

Besides this matter, there are many new and important points in the New Korean Acts that rights holders need to pay attention to, such as: 

• The expansion of the definition of “use of a trademark” to cover the online distribution of “digital goods”
• The Introduction of a Partial Rejection System.
• The Establishment of a Re-Examination System.

Expert opinions

YungJoon KWON, a managing partner in KWON & KIM Patent & Trademark Attorneys in Seoul, South Korea stated about the lowering of standards in the new Korean Acts and the need to change the current law: “The new law is intended to lower a hurdle to curing the problem. From another perspective, once a Final rejection, where an application is finally rejected at a primary examiner’s level, is issued to an application for failing to meet the grant requirements, and if the applicant wishes to appeal the rejection, the Korean IPR law just allows 30 days before the appeal is lodged, counted from the receipt date of the rejection, which is much short, during and by which the applicant and the representative should make a decision of whether to appeal or amend claims (for patent) or delete some identifications of goods or services (for trademark). In many cases, especially, for international clients, an extension is required to be requested along with paying a further fee, to secure additional 30 days to review and make a decision. Such a short time period pushes a representing attorney to rush to report the bad news of rejection to the client almost immediately, without deeper analysis to evaluate the chance of success of possible appeal or other resolutions such as dividing an application. Under the new law, we will have enough time to analyze, report, and discuss with the client.”

YungJoon also expressed his positive viewpoint on the new amendments to the Korean Acts: “The amendment will revise our IPR law to be more friendly and favorable to the applicant, especially, the international applicant. Additionally, a priority claim will be automatically attached to a divisional application if the claim was made to the parent application to prevent a loss of priority claim for the divisional application by not adding the claim when dividing an application by mistakes. Also, a co-owner of the patent right will continue to use its patent invention for her or his ongoing business using the patent invention, even after the patent is transferred to a third party by a foreclosure auction to settle other owner’s debt.”

*** Other Articles***

– You could visit here to see the Procedure of Trademark in South Korea.

– You can also check the Required documents of filing trademark in South Korea.

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