[Patent Infringement Litigation in Korea - 3] Check Points & Actions Must Be Considered Before Enforcement Actions

Patented claims must be valid and infringed in theory. However such claims are not common in reality. Accordingly a patentee must check strength of his patent before enforcing his patent against accused infringers. To be a valid patent claim, it should be strong enough to sustain invalidity challenges. The scope of the claim must be narrow enough to be novel and non-obvious over the prior art. On the other hand, a claim should be infringed by the competitor’s product or process. For this purpose, the scope of a claim must be broad enough to cover competitor’s product or process. These are contradictory and it is really hard to achieve desirable balance between two opposites.

 

Before filing a patent infringement lawsuit, it is desirable for a patentee to check strength of each patented claim based on thorough prior art search. Usually, it is necessary to fix any errors in issued patents, protect claims from possible invalidity challenges through amending claims to be novel and non-obvious over the prior art; and further pursue claims directed to competitor’s products or process if possible.

 

Two ways are available to amend patented claims after granting a patent in Korea. Before a patent infringement action, a patentee may amend claims as precautionary measure through ex parte proceeding at the IPT of KIPO. Namely, the first way is an independent petition to request amendment as like re-issue request in the U.S. Actually, Korea use a different terminology of “correct” for granted patents rather than “amend” for pending application before grant. It is to differentiate from each other because two terms do not have the same meaning.

The second option to amend a patented claim is correlated with an invalidity proceeding. During invalidity proceeding, a patentee may request to amend granted claims as a defense. It is very common to file a motion to correct patents during invalidity proceeding. This is inter partes proceedings between a patentee and a challenger and consolidated in invalidity proceeding. Both parties may argue whether or not such amendment to be allowed.

 

A patentee may amend granted claims of a patent within the scope of original disclosure and within the scope of protection of the patent as granted. In reality, post grant corrections of claims are allowed within a very limited scope. The correction must be made to (1) narrow a claim, (2) correct typological errors, or (3) clarify ambiguous description. The correction must not broaden or alter the scope of the patent right.