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In Korea, plants can be protected by both Patent Law and Plant Variety Protection Law. Activities to seek the protection of the IP rights pertaining to plants have been growing, particularly with the development of genetic engineering technology as well as with the growth of the agriculture industry. This growing interest is evidenced by the significant increase in the number of applications, not only for patents, but also for plant variety rights. For example, as of December 2015, more than 8,000 applications for plant variety registrations were filed in Korea which makes Korea the seventh most active filer of plant variety rights among the UPOV member countries.

From January 1 this year, the Korean Patent Court became the exclusive appellate court for IP related cases (see February issue). After this change, the Patent Court released some guidelines on the rules and procedures applicable to IP cases. The most recent is the "Guideline of Civil Practice and Procedure of the Patent Court of Korea" (the Guideline), which was published in English and Japanese.

The Korean Patent Act has been revised twice in the year 2016 and the revisions are quite substantial. Some of the new revisions will become effective from June 30 2016 and others from March 1 2017. The major revisions include the following:

Recently, the Korean Supreme Court made a key decision regarding how to read the prior art when making an inventive step determination (2013 Hu 2873 and 2880 (consolidated), January 14 2016).

Three years ago, Korea adopted a new patent term adjustment (PTA) system. As many readers know, PTA is a system that allows extension of a patent term to the patent owner to compensate for an unreasonable delay during the prosecution phase.

In 2016, Korea has been substantially re-shaping its IP system. One such change is the Trade Mark Act, which has been comprehensively re-drafted. One of the main changes in trade mark is the non-use cancellation of the registered mark. When a registered trade mark has not been used in Korea for three consecutive years, third parties can seek to cancel it on the grounds of non-use. According to the existing Act, only an interested party can request cancellation of a non-used mark. However, under the new system, legal standing is no longer required; therefore, any person may request cancellation of a non-used registered mark. The new system is expected to accelerate the procedure and give more opportunity to those who actually intend to use the mark by remedying weaknesses in the registration system.