earticle

영어

The Unfair Competition Prevention Act aims at constructing and maintaining the order for fair competition. The Act was amended on January 20th, 2004 to protect against copying of configuration of goods and prohibit such copying. Therefore when a certain configuration of goods which was developed and merchandised by other person has come to be on the market, then without regard to the matter if the configuration is widely recognized to indicate other person's product, or registrable as a design, it is in principle prohibited for a third person to make use of the same configuration or a substantial same one for goods of the same kind. Such a deed should constitute a type of unfair competitive deeds under the Act and destroy the order for fair competition. By the way, the amendment of the Act was deeply influenced by the Japanese legal protection system of configuration of goods. Even though several studies has been made on the legal protection of the configuration of goods under the new Act, the systematic analysis of Japanese legal theory and judicial precedent has never been studied so far. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to examine the Japanese judicial precedent and review the existing legal theory about the configuration of goods in order to provide a systematic understanding of the new Act.