Hanol IP & Law

In 2015, the Korean Supreme Court cleared the patent eligibility hurdle for dosage regimen inventions, and announced that dosage regimens are patentable if they satisfy other patentability requirements including novelty and inventiveness (Supreme Court en banc decision 2014Hu768, May 21 2015). In the first case where the inventiveness of a dosage invention was at issue (Patent Court decision 2015Heo7889, February 3 2017), the Korean Patent Court denied inventiveness on the ground that optimising dosage regimens to achieve the reduction of toxicity or improvement of efficacy is considered routine experimentation or work of a person having ordinary skill in the art (PHOSITA). This shows that Korea has a strict standard for the inventiveness of dosage regimen patents.

Many food products contain known ingredients, rather than novel ingredients, as essential components. Such food products are usually a result of combining components in a special ratio to achieve a particular flavour, taste, effect, etc.

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).