Streamlining of Drawings for Design Applications
- Revision to Enforcement Rule of the Design Protection Act, effective from October 1, 2019 -
The Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO) has announced that for the convenience of design applicants, the Drawings required to be submitted in an application have been simplified from the current Basic Drawings, Additional Drawings, and Reference Drawings to only the Basic Drawings and Reference drawings.
Basic Drawings: perspective, front and rear view, left and right side views, and top and bottom views that express the overall form of a design
Additional Drawings: sectional, enlarged, exploded views, etc. that express the specific shape of a design
Reference Drawings: drawings that aid in the understanding of use and display the status of use of a design
Until now, in cases where a drawing name was incorrectly written or because it was difficult to clearly distinguish the drawing type, applicants have often been inconvenienced by the need to modify or supplement the drawing name according to the rejection opinion of the Examiner.
To alleviate such situations going forward, 'Additional Drawings' are to be integrated into the 'Basic Drawings' so that partial enlarged drawings, sectional drawings, and exploded drawings can be included in the Basic Drawings without being specifically submitted as Additional Drawings.
As a result, an applicant can now easily create drawings while eliminating possible confusion concerning the drawing name and can quickly receive the examination result without issuance of an Office Action by the Examiner.
Meanwhile, it has been required that a special symbol font have 119 characters designated irrespective of an applicant's intention to use all of them, but from now on, only 16 characters will need to be shown and any other symbols to be registered should be additionally designated.
By minimizing the number of special symbols required to be submitted, it is now possible to file an application without adding undesired font symbols, and accordingly, an applicant can conveniently describe only those special symbols for which registration is actually desired.
The Trademark & Design Examination Bureau of KIPO stated, "Besides drawings, we will continue to discover system improvements in various fields so that applicants can file design applications and achieve registration more easily and conveniently."
Meanwhile, KIPO plans to revise and implement a detailed Design Examination Standard while will include improved contents in accordance with the recent revision and implementation of the Enforcement Rule of the Design Protection Act.
[Source: KIPO]