"United to Prevent Technology Leakage" Launch of the Pukyung Act System Improvement Committee

Experts from academia, the legal sector, and industry come together to prevent technology leakage.

On the 7th, the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) announced that the “Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act (hereinafter referred to as the UCPA)” Institutional Improvement Committee was launched and has begun its activities at the KIPO Seoul Office.

The committee consists of 12 members, including scholars in the field of trade secrets, lawyers with extensive practical experience in trade secret cases, and industry experts responsible for actual trade secret protection tasks in large and small-to-medium enterprises, who will work to prevent the leakage of trade secrets such as advanced technologies.

The UCPA is a law established to prevent unfair competition acts such as the distribution of counterfeit goods and theft of others’ ideas, and to protect trade secrets.

KIPO has continuously improved the UCPA by reflecting the increasing importance of trade secret protection amid intensified technological hegemony competition, such as raising the punitive damages cap for trade secret infringement from 3 times to 5 times, and strengthening corporate fines to up to 3 times the fines imposed on the perpetrators to respond to organized trade secret infringements.

However, even with strengthened penalties, if the value, importance, and scale of damage of the infringed trade secret cannot be fully explained, it is difficult to lead to actual punishment, highlighting the need for institutional improvements to supplement this during trials.

A representative example is the introduction of the lawyer’s right to make statements, allowing the victim’s lawyer to directly explain the trade secret to the judge in criminal trials for trade secret infringement.

The risk of trade secrets leaking overseas is also emerging as a social issue due to cross-border companies and increased personnel exchanges.

In particular, acts such as facilitating trade secret infringement by enticing key personnel from companies and cases of trade secret leakage by foreign direct investment companies to domestic companies are considered acts that increase the risk of advanced domestic technology leaking abroad, raising the need for institutional improvements to prevent this.

The committee was launched to gather consensus by having experts from various fields discuss the need for institutional improvements raised in the field.

KIPO plans to summarize the major issues discussed by the committee by the end of the year and selectively proceed with legislative procedures starting next year.

Jung In-sik, Director of the Industrial Property Protection Cooperation Bureau at KIPO, said, “Considering that countries around the world are strengthening the protection of their advanced technologies and reorganizing supply chains, trade secret protection is directly linked to the competitiveness of both companies and the nation.” He added, “KIPO will gather opinions from experts in unfair competition acts and trade secrets to establish and implement timely and systematic measures to improve the system.”

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