Assemblyman Song Gap-seok Introduces Amendment Bill for the 'Three Intellectual Property Laws'

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Yoon Jamin] A bill has been proposed to prevent individuals and small businesses with weak intellectual property rights foundations from suffering disadvantages during the application and rights protection process due to minor mistakes.

On the 3rd, Representative Song Gap-seok (The Democratic Party of Korea, Gwangju Seo-gu Gap) announced that he had taken the lead in proposing amendments to the "Three Intellectual Property Laws (Patent Act, Trademark Act, Design Protection Act)."

Rep. Song stated, "While South Korea's patent administration procedures are quite advanced, the system that carefully considers the convenience of applicants and rights holders is insufficient," adding, "It is urgent to improve the system to enhance the convenience of patent, trademark, and design applicants and to protect rights holders."

The amendment includes ▲ relaxing the conditions for restoring applications and rights from 'unavoidable reasons' to 'justifiable reasons' ▲ extending the period for filing appeals against rejection decisions and requests for reexamination from the current 30 days to 3 months ▲ expanding the scope of domestic priority claims ▲ introducing an automatic recognition system for divisional application priority and partially adopting a divisional application system ▲ easing the conditions for restoring patent rights, etc. ▲ protecting co-patent holders who are practicing (using) the patent.

In particular, complaints about extending the period for appeals against rejection decisions and requests for reexamination have been continuously raised by individuals and small businesses in the field.

This is because the period to file an appeal after a rejection decision is only 30 days, which is short.

In fact, from 2014 to 2018, among 119,912 patent applications for which appeals against rejection decisions and reexaminations were requested, 21,290 cases, accounting for 17.8%, extended the appeal filing period.

Major overseas patent offices (United States, China, Japan) have a 3-month period for filing appeals against patent rejection decisions, which is three times longer than that of South Korea.

Rep. Song emphasized, "Through this amendment, applicants will secure sufficient time to carefully review the reasons for rejection and find additional measures to obtain recognition of intellectual property rights."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.