A bill to amend the Korean Design Protection Act ("DPA") was promulgated on May 27, 2025, and the amendments will take effect on November 28, 2025. The major changes to the DPA will be as follows.

1. New rejection grounds in partial examination

Depending on the designated Locarno class, design applications filed in Korea either undergo substantive examination or a partial-substantive examination, the latter of which allows designs to be granted more quickly. Designs subject to partial examination are registered after inspection of only very basic and perfunctory matters, such as whether the design application meets the formality requirements and whether the design can be easily created from a design that is widely known in Korea by a person with ordinary skill in that particular design field. 

The amendment will allow the examiner to reject the registration of an application subject to partial examination if it obviously lacks novelty or conflicts with senior designs. The purpose of the amendment is to prevent abuse of the partial design registration system by obtaining and exercising design rights for designs that had already been disclosed. 

2. Additional opposition period after partial examination

The current opposition period for designs registered after partial examination is three months from the publication date of the registered designs. The amendment additionally allows oppositions to be filed within three months from the date of receiving a notice of infringement, but no later than 1 year from the publication date. This additional period aims to protect third parties' rights against imitation designs registered after partial examination. 

3. New court action for determining design ownership

Under the existing DPA, if a design is issued to a registrant who lacks ownership rights in the design, the only recourse for the actual owner t of the design is first to invalidate the design at the IPTAB and then file a new application to obtain a design in its own name. This process is unnecessarily burdensome and may discourage ownership claims from being asserted where it is unclear whether the design is valuable enough to justify the effort and expense.

Under the amended DPA, a party claiming ownership may now bring an action before a Korean court for a transfer of the design right. If the court recognizes the ownership claim, it can simply order that the design right be transferred from the registrant to the rightful owner. Thus, the amendment makes it much easier to rectify the improper ownership of design rights.