AREAS OF EXPERTISE

IP Information

Intellectual Property or IP refers to a range of rights protecting intangible property that is the result of creativity such as patents or trade marks or copyrights.
IP gives your business a creative edge and can become a valuable business asset. It is important to be aware of any IP rights that you may own or be entitled to and to take the necessary steps to protect these assets. If you wish to launch a new product or brand you should consult with a patent attorney to ascertain if there are any means of protection open to you and to ensure that what you wish to do does not infringe any party's existing rights.

If you have developed a product or method then you may be entitled to patent and/or design protection. If you have come up with a new brand name or logo you may be entitled to trade mark protection.

PATENT

The patent system is designed to advance the industry of a nation by protecting and encouraging inventions. To achieve this, patent rights are granted in exchange for publicizing technology. Specifically, technology is accumulated and published technology is used through the publishing of inventions, and inventors are granted exclusive rights to thereby expedite commercialization and instill the desire to invent, ultimately contributing to commercial development.

UTILITY MODEL

The utility model system is one for protecting and encouraging practical devices and promoting their use. To achieve this, the purpose thereof is to “grant utility model rights in exchange for publicizing technology”. Specifically, technology is accumulated and published technology is used through the publishing of inventions, and inventors are granted exclusive rights to thereby expedite commercialization and instill the desire to invent, ultimately contributing to commercial development.

TRADEMARK

A trademark as a social fact denotes all sensuous expression means used to distinguish the products of different parties from each other. However, the task of protecting all such marks would be difficult from a legal and technical perspective, and thus the Trademark Act limits the components of a trademark that can be protected. While in the past, the components for a trademark were limited only to signs, characters, figures, three dimensional shapes, or combinations thereof, and to colors combined with each of the same, the scope of protection for trademarks was expanded on July 1, 2007 to designate trademarks for colors or the combination of colors, hologram trademarks, moving trademarks, and all other tangible trademarks that can be visually discerned for protection under the Trademark Act. However, trademarks under the Trademark Act are still limited to things that can be discerned visually, and marks that can be perceived through the senses of hearing, smell, and therefore taste such as noises, smells, and tastes, which cannot be discerned visually cannot receive protection as a trademark under the Trademark Act (however, an effort is currently underway to revise the law to include marks that cannot be discerned visually, but only through hearing, smell, etc.)

Also, marks that are not used for discerning between one’s own trademark and another’s trademark are not trademarks, so that even when they are used on products, designs used to simply provide an aesthetic appeal to the products or price tags that have nothing to do with identifying one’s own product from another’s are not trademarks under the Trademark Act. In view of a broader concept of the trademark, the trademark includes service marks, collective marks, and business marks. For example

DESIGN

As a foreign word derived from the English word ‘design’, design is a term that is a broad concept encompassing product designs for products, visual designs such as advertisement posters, graphic designs, and digital designs, and environment designs for living spaces and environments. Article 2(i) of the Design Protection Act prescribes that “a design means the shape, pattern, color of an article [a part of an article (with exceptions in Article 12) and script are included, the same in the below] or a combination thereof, which produces an aesthetic impression in the sense of sight.

Thus, according to the Design Protection Act, a design can be said to be a design for the outside of a corporeal article (or a part of said article) that can be the subject of an independent transaction.

PCT

As an international treaty between multiple parties for promoting international filing through the unification and simplification of international filing procedures and overcoming disjunction between the patent system and economic reality, the PCT was joined by Korea in 1984. The international service bureau with headquarters in Geneva has control over PCT international filing, and the PCT is a treaty that allows patent protection for a proper invention to be simultaneously obtained through a single filing from designated treaty nations (nations who have joined the treaty).