earticle

영어

There are various laws to be applied in protection the shapes of goods. However, those laws have limits on the protection of the shape of goods, because most of the existing ones were not made to protect the shape itself of goods. To resolve this, the Unfair Competition Prevention Act was amended on January 20th, 2004 to classify the act of copying from other goods as unfair competition act and prohibit such activities. This amendment of the Act opened the door to more direct protection of the shape of goods. The system, however, has raised more problems compared with the existing industrial property right protection system. In addition, it is problematic that the applicability of the Article was greatly reduced because of too short protection period. This paper examines a variety of arguments and problems concerning the interpretation of the newly added article.