Amended rules in Korea regarding inventorship

Recently, two significant amendments related to inventorship have been made to the Enforcement Rules of the Korean Patent Act, which are essential for those seeking to file a patent in Korea. These amendments aim to improve the previous administrative practice of managing inventor information by formally collecting and utilizing it as industrial property data, thereby strengthening the country’s industrial competitiveness.

1. Improvement of the Inventorship Correction Procedure

In the past, there were cases where individuals without actual inventive contribution were added as inventors after the issuance of the notice of allowance. To prevent such misuse, the amendment now partially limits the timeframe for correcting inventorship, which was previously unrestricted. Additionally, documents that were once required only after patent registration must now also be submitted during prosecution.

According to the amended rules, patent applicants are no longer permitted to add inventors between the notice of allowance (NOA) and the patent registration. During this period, only limited corrections are allowed, such as correcting typographical errors, updating addresses, or changing names and transliterations, provided the listed inventors remain unchanged. However, inventorship can still be corrected from the time of filing until the issuance of the NOA, as well as after patent registration, as before.

Previously, a simple statement of reasons was sufficient to correct inventors during the prosecution of the patent application. Under the amended rules, however, supporting documents verifying the inventor’s identity are now required, including: i) a statement explaining the reasons for the correction, and ii) a declaration signed or sealed by both the patent applicant and all inventors involved in correction.

These new requirements apply to any inventorship correction documents submitted on or after November 1, 2024.

2. Requirement of Inventor Identification Information in Patent Applications

To systematically manage and utilize industrial property information collected and generated by the Commissioner of the Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), the Act on the Management and Utilization of Industrial Property Information was enacted and has been in effect since August 7, 2024. This Act grants the Commissioner the authority to collect, process, and utilize publicly available industrial property information, as well as provide the processed data to support the effective planning and implementation of research and development initiatives and technology/industry-related strategies. Additionally, to safeguard technologies crucial to national security or significant national interests, the Act authorizes the Commissioner to use pending industrial property information or share it with relevant national administrative agencies when deemed necessary.

In line with this, the amended rules require patent applications to specify the citizenship of each inventor. However, submission of supporting documents, such as citizenship certificates, is not necessary.

These changes have been applied to all patent applications filed on or after November 1, 2024. Additionally, specifying the citizenship of each inventor is mandatory for both new applications and divisional applications.

3. Summary

The amend rules to introduce changes to inventorship correction procedure and inventor Identification information requirements at the time of filing, are summarized in the table below.