한국 지적재산권법과 다른 법률들과의 관계

This article is the last part of a trilogy on 'what is Korean intellectual property law'. In this article, the relationship of civil law, commercial law, constitutional law, administrative law and antitrust law in the Korea to Korean intellectual property law are compared respectively to the relationship of mother, father, grandfather, uncle and cousin to IP three brothers (patent, trademark and copyright). The mother of IP three brothers, civil law, has provided not only theoretical basis for sound interpretation of Korean IP law but also human resources for research of the law. Among three brothers, Korean copyright law is closest to their mother. But, in the whole perspective of the three brothers, there are growing rebellions against their mother such as introduction of statutory damage system and territorial disputes over the right of publicity. Korean commercial law is often misunderstood as having almost nothing to do with Korean IP law because the statutory clauses of the two laws are having rare connection with each other. However, given the facts that the entities who own and exercise intellectual property rights in most cases are nothing but corporations established by Korean commercial law and such corporations have made the most significant effort to produce intellectual property in Korea by concentrating and centralizing capital, Korean commercial law is nothing less than the father who gave a birth to Korean IP law and has brought it up. Similarly, Korean constitutional law as a grandfather of Korean IP law has given authoritative instructions including crucial contribution to the birth of the Korean Patent Court. The reason why Korean administrative law is like an uncle to Korean IP law would be that the former law has been deeply involved in the registration process of intellectual property for creation of the rights in the private law even though the former law itself is in the public law and administrative law of science & technology today plays an important role indirectly in the creation of intellectual property. Finally, the relationship of cousins shall be used as a metaphor for the relations between Korean IP law and Korean antitrust Law because the two laws are commonly dealing with monopoly under capitalism while each law belongs to different category, private law and public law. Korean antitrust Law is likely to conflict with Korean patent law in near future. On the contrary, Korean antitrust law and Korean Unfair Competition Prevention Act are so close to each other in their legal principle that they could arguably be classified as the same type of laws by some assertors. Through the metaphor of a big family as above, this article tries to reveal the correlation and relative position of other laws surrounding Korean IP law under the same roof, the whole Korean law. Furthermore, by this integrated observation, this article also shows some important points as below: Korean IP law has been relatively rapidly expanding even among the growing Korean laws, the main reason for such expansion is big helps from Korean civil law, Korean commercial law, Korean constitutional law and Korean administrative law, the sound attitude to return such favors from other Korean laws is not to forget that we should focus rather on prior discussions on the same issue by other Korean laws or a specific situation in our country than too much on a weird logic based upon foreign IP laws.