Patent registration in South Korea. South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula, and sharing a land border with North Korea. South Korea is a developed country with a high-income economy and is the most industrialized member country of the OECD. South Korean brands such as LG Electronics and Samsung are internationally famous and garnered South Korea’s reputation for their quality electronics and other manufactured goods. Accordingly, many businesses want to enter this market and one of the most important preparations a business needs to take before expanding to this country is to learn the procedure of patent registration in South Korea.
Patent in South Korea
According to South Korean law, a patent in this country is a grant of a property right given by the Government to an inventor. With a patent, the inventor, or the patentee will have the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, selling the invention in a country, or importing the invention into a country, along with other rights to protect their best interests.
To be patentable in South Korea, an invention must satisfy the requirement of new, inventive, and industrially applicability.
In addition, an invention that is unpatentable can also be an improvement on existing items or methods.
On the other hand, the subjects that are patentable in South Korea are:
- Discoveries, laws of nature, and mathematical methods;
- Aesthetic designs;
- Systems, rules, and methods for the performance of mental labor, games or management, computer programs;
- Presentation of data and abstract ideas.
Necessary documents for patent registration in South Korea
The necessary documents for patent registration in South Korea include:
- The request to grant a patent (patent application);
- Detailed information on the applicant(s) including the applicant’s names, addresses, etc.;
- A description of the invention;
- A signed and stamped power of attorney by the applicant(s);
- A copy of the amendments (if any);
- Priority documents (if any).
- Other required documents.
The patent application may be filed in any language but a translation of South Korea needs to be provided to the IP Office within a limited time period.
The procedure for patent registration in South Korea
To obtain a patent in South Korea, the applicant needs to file their patent application to the IP Office of South Korea – KIPO.
It should be noted that KIPO will reject patents for inventions that cover laws of nature or natural phenomena, or inventions that are contrary to laws of nature.
Therefore, applicants should conduct a patent search before filing their patent application to avoid wasting time and resources.
When receiving the patent application, KIPO performs a formal and substantive examination to check the validity of the application as well as its content, to see if it is registrable.
In addition to the above examinations, the applicant must file an examination request separately from the patent application in Korean to begin those examinations, as KIPO will not begin its examination until they have received the application and the request attached. The time frame to file the request is 3 years from the filing date of the original application.
If the invention passes through the examinations, a patent will be granted to the applicant and it will have 20 years of protection from the filing date.
You can see a list of Korea IP firms here.