earticle

영어

The importance of technological irmovation to economic development has greatly increased, as so called 'knowledge based economy' started to grow since the last decade of 20th century. Nowadays employee innovation has been sharing overwhelming portion in all inventions in the main advanced countries. However employee invention compensation systems in those countries are now experiencing considerable revisions, as the socio-economic circumstances such as employment structures change rapidly. In Japan, the law suit cases on account of employee invention compensation has largely increased, and the amounts of sanctioned compensations by the judicial courts have become huge since 19905. And judicial decisions established the principle of aggressive intervention to calculate the amount of compensation. These shocks led to the revision of the Patent Act of 1959 in 2004. The main change by the revision was that judicial intervention should be limited only to the cases of irrational procedures, by placing great importance on the private decisions between the related parties. This paper aims to clarify the employee invention system of Japan and its characteristics, focusing on the revised Patent Act and its revising process.