Patent Office: "Intangible 'Hwasang Design' Also Protected as Intellectual Property"

Image of visual design using augmented reality. Provided by the Korean Intellectual Property Office (Source=Clipart Korea)

[Asia Economy (Daejeon) Reporter Jeong Il-woong] The path has been opened for image designs realized through digital new technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to be filed, registered, and protected as intellectual property rights.

Even without a physical form, if the design expressed in a space using new technologies contains device operation or functions, the image itself can now be protected.

This is significant as it supplements the previous limitation where only product designs with displayed images were recognized and protected as intellectual property rights.

On the 19th, the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) announced that through amendments to related laws, it will establish and implement a system to protect digital image designs independently from physical products in fields such as information communication, medical information, security, and health management.

The amended laws will take effect from the 21st of this month, from which point image designs can also be filed and registered as designs.

Additionally, registered image designs will be protected against unauthorized use by third parties or design rights infringement acts such as online transmission.

Most importantly, KIPO expects that based on domestic image design filings, companies will be able to quickly secure design rights for image designs overseas, facilitating overseas expansion and preemption in related industrial sectors.

This is because if the same image design filed domestically is filed overseas within six months, priority under treaties can be claimed, allowing the overseas filing to be recognized with the same date as the domestic filing, enabling early acquisition of design rights.

Separately, KIPO emphasized that from the 21st, it will implement an institutional measure to protect ‘partial designs’ for acts where only some distinctive parts of ‘a set of products’?commonly used as a set, such as tea cup sets?are imitated by others.

The core is to regulate acts that cleverly infringe design rights by imitating the unique identical shapes of relatively high design value components such as handles of spoons, forks, and knives, while producing other parts in different shapes.

Until now, for sets of products, design rights infringement claims were difficult because even if distinctive identical shapes were similar, the inclusion of different shapes led to recognition as non-similar when comparing the entire design.

Mok Seong-ho, Director of the Trademark and Design Examination Bureau at KIPO, said, “Competition to secure new technologies has intensified recently, and the importance of design innovation is more prominent than ever. Considering this situation, KIPO has introduced protection for image designs and partial design protection for sets of products, marking a turning point in the development of the domestic design industry.”