The Korean Intellectual Property Office passed the amendment at a plenary session of the National Assembly on the 1st such like the Trademark Act Industrial Design Protection Act Unfair Competition Prevention and Trade Secret Protection Act to allow compensation for damages even for infringing products sold in excess of the rights holders production capacity. It announced on the 2nd that it will be implemented in June next year.

The main content of this revised law is to include the profits that the right holder could receive through the license agreement in the amount of damages if there was no infringement.

Until now even if the infringement occurred on a large scale there was no compensation for damages for the sales volume exceeding the production capacity of the right holder. As a result the illogical situation continued in which the act of infringement was rather profitable than the legal license agreement.

Due to the amendment the measure of damages of most intellectual property (except copyright) have been the same so when infringements of patent rights trademark rights and design rights occur at the same time the market confusion caused by different measure of damages has reduced.

Korea is the second country to introduce a triple compensation system for infringement of intellectual property while calculating damages as in the amendment. In particular Korea is the only country that has reflected these systems in the written law.

In the future the revised measure of damages and the triple compensation are combined so that they are expected to be able to strongly protect intellectual property from malicious and deliberate large-scale infringement.

Jeong Yeon-woo a director of the Intellectual Property Protection Division of the Korean Intellectual Property Office said “This amendment laid the foundation for intellectual property to receive a proper price. In the future the Korean-style evidence collection will be introduced to enhance the effectiveness of the triple compensation system and the method for calculating the amount of damage in the litigation.”

In addition he said “Efforts will be put into making a system suitable for Korean situation such as preparing countermeasure by broadly communicating with related industries on matters of concern in some semiconductor industries regarding Korean evidence collection.