Collaboration with Ministry of SMEs and Startups gets underway — agencies to share infringement cases, coordinate responses and link support programs to shield K-brands
South Korea's intellectual property authority and the Ministry of SMEs and Startups have joined forces as cases of domestic products having their trademarks or designs stolen or copied abroad — and then sold through global platforms or offline stores — continue to surge.
The two agencies held a launch meeting Friday at the Government Daejeon Complex to inaugurate the SME K-Brand Intellectual Property Protection Council.
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency, which broadly support small and medium-sized enterprise exports, joined with the Korea Intellectual Property Office and the Korea Intellectual Property Protection Agency — which oversee overseas IP dispute support and related protections for Korean SMEs — to establish the council and agreed to mount a coordinated response to minimize such harm.
Going forward, the agencies will use their overseas hub centers — the Global Business Centers and overseas IP centers — to share and respond to infringement cases and related information arising from unauthorized trademark preemption or counterfeiting abroad. They will also link their programs so that SMEs participating in export support initiatives can simultaneously receive assistance under overseas intellectual property protection programs.
The agencies will also jointly conduct education sessions and briefings on overseas intellectual property protection and dispute-response support. To pursue this systematically, the Korea SMEs and Startups Agency and the Korea Intellectual Property Protection Agency plan to sign a memorandum of understanding and move into full implementation.
Shim Jae-yun, director general for global growth policy at the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, said counterfeiting and imitation of K-brands goes beyond economic loss to inflict serious damage on a company's image and brand, threatening its very survival. "We will further strengthen cooperation among relevant agencies to minimize the intellectual property damage our small and medium-sized enterprises suffer in the course of exporting," he said.
Park Jin-hwan, director general for intellectual property dispute response at the Korea Intellectual Property Office, said the key is to provide proactive support so that brands built up through years of hard work by SMEs are not hit by unexpected damage from unauthorized trademark preemption or counterfeit goods when entering overseas markets. "We will work to build an intellectual property protection network that closely connects the Ministry of SMEs and Startups' export support infrastructure with the IP dispute-response system of the Korea Intellectual Property Office, so that our small and medium-sized enterprises can grow with confidence abroad," he said.
kwonhl@heraldcorp.com
