The Intellectual Property Office’s Patent Tribunal will hold a special discussion on ‘The Current Status and Challenges of Patent Cancellation Requests and Invalidity Trials’ on December 12 at the Korean Patent Attorneys Association’s training room. This discussion is based on the results of the ‘Research on Improving the Trial System to Enhance Patent Stability’ conducted by the Patent Tribunal, aiming to discuss systematic improvements for the patent cancellation request system and the invalidity trial system.
The research suggested the need to expand the period and reasons for the patent cancellation request system to promptly correct wrongly granted patents, ensure the consistency of application requirements and procedures between cancellation requests and invalidity trials, and establish a validity presumption rule to strengthen the legal stability of patents. It emphasized the need for a dual patent strategy that initially uses the patent cancellation request system to quickly rectify invalid patents and subsequently maintains valid patents stably.
This discussion aims to share these research results with practitioners, academia, and industry, and to concretize the necessary policy and practical discussions in the future system improvement process. The discussion will cover measures to promptly rectify invalid patents based on the current operation status of the patent cancellation request system, including the expansion of periods and reasons. Additionally, the introduction of specific obligations for invalidity trial petitions will be discussed, and after the presentations, experts including those from academia and industry will share their opinions to enhance the effectiveness of the trial system.
Patent Tribunal Chief Seo Eul-soo stated, ‘Promptly filtering out invalid patents is an essential foundation for strengthening industrial competitiveness, and at the same time, stably protecting valid patents is a key factor supporting corporate technological investment and innovation.’ He added, ‘This discussion will practically contribute to creating a strong patent ecosystem and refining the trial system.’