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Our friends over at the China Law Blog have posted on an intellectual property issue that leads to a good deal of work for the IP Litigation Practice at the Korean office of IPG Legal.
If you don’t want the added cost of litigating a matter in a Korean court, please register your trademark in Korea. Registering in the U.S. and the E.U. is not enough. Your “international filing” only gives you a grace period to file in other nations that have signed onto particular international treaties. Thus, registering your trademarks in Korea and developing an IP protection strategy is essential to protecting your trademarks in Korea. For an article on IP Protection Strategies please see: Protecting my IP in Korea.
For those who have not registered their trademark or service mark in Korea and have an infringer using your trademark or service mark, options exist, but you should act quickly.
As the China Law Blog notes:
“China is a first to file country, which means that, with very few exceptions, whoever files for a particular trademark in a particular category gets it. So if the name of your company is XYZ and you make shoes and you have been manufacturing your shoes in China for the last three years and someone registers the XYZ trademark for shoes, that other company gets the trademark. And then, armed with the trademark, that company has every right to stop your XYZ shoes from leaving China because they violate its trademark.”
Replace the word Korea with China and reread. Korea is, also, a first to file jurisdiction. If you would like a consultation with an intellectual property lawyer in Korea, please schedule a call with a lawyer at: Schedule a Call with a Korean Intellectual Property Lawyer.
