Going forward, when the duty of good faith is violated—such as by falsifying experimental data or copying little-known inventions of others to file patent applications—the registered patent will be invalidated and the violator will also face criminal punishment. The measure aims to block abnormal filing practices that undermine confidence in patents.
The Ministry of Intellectual Property said on the 21st that it will revise laws and systems to regulate violations of the duty of good faith and will respond strictly to large-scale, repeated deceitful conduct.
The Ministry of Intellectual Property plans to establish a duty-of-good-faith compliance principle in the Patent Act. Currently, even if a patent is granted after an examiner is deceived with falsified experimental data, the patent can be maintained by deleting only the relevant institutional sector when a problem arises. Because of this, it is difficult to preemptively block attempts to obtain patents with specifications that include false materials.
The Ministry of Intellectual Property plans to prepare a measure to deny corrections and invalidate an entire patent if it is found that false materials were stated in the specification and the patent was registered. When a patent application is suspected of violating the "duty-of-good-faith compliance principle," the ministry will notify the reason for rejection and establish a process requiring the applicant to prove on their own that the application is legitimate.
The Criminal Act's "crime of deceitful acts" under the current Patent Act will also be revised. The current provision punishes "a person who receives a patent decision" (punishable subject) for "a false or other wrongful act" (target conduct), but the target conduct is vague and the punishable subject is narrow. Even if someone copies another person's little-known invention and files for a patent, it is unclear whether the conduct itself falls under "a false or other wrongful act," which has led to cases where the patent was invalidated but the actor was not punished. The punishable subject is also limited to "a person who receives a patent decision," creating a problem where even if someone files a patent application by misappropriating technical materials, they cannot be punished as long as no patent decision is made. This structure makes it difficult to block misappropriation of technical materials in advance.
The Ministry of Intellectual Property plans to amend the "crime of deceitful acts" provision to specify punishable types of conduct and to allow punishment when deceitful acts are repeated, even if no patent decision is obtained. It will strengthen the sentencing to the level of the Criminal Act's "obstruction of official duties," taking a more stringent stance against deceitful conduct.
The ministry also plans to block expedient patent filings that, with the purpose of deceiving examiners to obtain patents, pull in meaningless configurations from unrelated technical fields and simply combine them with the core technology. For example, when the main configuration is a mechanical device but an unrelated chemical coating technology is combined in a patent application, applicants may simply add meaningless configurations from a technical field unfamiliar to the examiner and file a patent application claiming combined technologies. This undermines patent quality.
Jeong Yeon-u, Vice Minister of the Ministry of Intellectual Property, said, "Acts that seek to obtain patents improperly lead to serious consequences that undermine trust in intellectual property administration," and added, "We will weed out 'trick' patents and create an environment where the real technologies of honest inventors and corporations can be properly protected."