SOUTH KOREA Trends and Developments Contributed by: Hwansung Park, Eunwoo (Vera) Lee, Hankil D. Kang and Jung Heo, Lee & Ko
mark Act expands the “trade mark use” definition to include acts of supplying goods or packaging marked with a trade mark abroad to Korea through carriers or other third parties. Counterfeit goods entering via carriers can now be explicitly treated as infringement. This strengthens border controls, such as customs clearance suspensions under the Customs Act, with high practical impact – overseas sellers become infringers at the import stage. Design Protection Act Online trading has fuelled abuse of partial design examination registrations, where public or common designs (eg, in fashion and accessories) are regis- tered as novel for exclusive sales. Amendments allow examiners (i) to reject applications clearly lacking novelty or priority, and (ii) extend opposition periods to three months from infringement notice. Rightful owners facing design theft by unauthorised parties previously endured invalidation actions and reappli- cation after court rulings. Now, they can (i) directly claim court-ordered transfer of the design right, and (ii) such transferred rights are not susceptible to invalida- tion actions. These apply to post-enforcement appli- cations (28 November 2025), with transfers covering existing unauthorised registrations. UCPA New provisions have been introduced to provide a legal basis for awarding individuals who have made significant contributions to preventing the overseas leakage of trade secrets, as well as to those who report such crimes. This measure is a response to the continuous rise in the number of cases of over- seas leakage of industrial technology detected over the past five years, which increased from 14 in 2019 to 23 in 2023. Patent and Utility Model Act Under the previous Patent Act and Utility Model Act, acts constituting infringement were defined as “pro- duction, use, assignment, leasing, importation, or offer to assign or lease”, while “export” was not expressly included. Courts further held that export does not fall within the scope of “assignment”, reasoning that export could be restrained indirectly by prohibiting the preceding domestic production or assignment, and
that there was therefore no need to regulate export as a separate act of exploitation. In practice, however, if a patentee failed to detect the infringer’s domestic production or assignment, it was not possible to enforce rights against the export activity itself, even where such export was identified. Situations in which only export occurred, without any domestic production or assignment, thus exposed a structural limitation on the effective protection of pat- ent rights. To address this gap, amendments to the Patent Act and Utility Model Act that explicitly include “export” within the list of infringing acts took effect on 22 July 2025. Under the revised statutes, a rights-holder may now assert patent infringement based solely on the export of an infringing product and obtain active legal remedies, including an injunction against the export, a claim for damages, and criminal sanctions (up to seven years’ imprisonment or a fine of up to KRW100 million). These amendments promote systemic consistency with other Korean IP statutes – such as the Design Protection Act, Trademark Act, Plant Variety Protec- tion Act, and UCPA – which already treat “export” as an infringing act. They also materially strengthen a patentee’s ability to obtain effective protection. Fur- thermore, they expand the range of available remedies beyond the administrative sanctions previously avail- able under the Act on the Investigation of Unfair Inter- national Trade Practices and Remedy against Injury to Industry (such as export bans and administrative fines) by enabling direct civil and criminal actions against export-based infringement. Copyright Act amendments The partial amendment bill to the Copyright Act was passed by the National Assembly on 29 January 2026 and promulgated on 10 February 2026, establishing measures to eradicate the illegal distribution of copy- right-infringing materials on the Internet. With the rapid global expansion of K content, the digital use of copyrighted works has increased dra- matically. In particular, illegal websites operating on foreign-based servers, websites using alternative
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