디자인 보호법제간 경합 현황과 경합의 처리를 둘러싼 제 문제

Industrial Design may be protected by several different forms of intellectual property rights(IPRs) such as design right, copyright, and trademark including protection from the Unfair Competition. Recently, these competitive and cumulative protections by the different IPRs have been increased and may cause some troubles. For example, cumulative design protection by the different IPRs may cause troubles in respect of the competition policy, legal purpose of each intellectual property law and require resolution policy demarcating a line between IPRs. First of all, it is discussed that the intellectual property protection regime to protect a design and mutual boundaries of each legal systems, and a conceptual framework to select a legal system strategically for the creators and users‘ point of view. It will be reviewed what kind of the pros and cons of each design protection in legal aspects for selecting a more effective method. Each type of designs such as a fine artistic design, typical industrial products design, applied art design, trade-dress design are divided into consideration to catch the differences in legal competitive and cumulative protection patterns they could reveal in general. Secondly, the patterns of Competitive Protections of a design are to be divided ‘Cumulative Protection System’ into ‘ Legal Conflicts between IPRs. Regarding ‘Cumulative Protection System’, this article discusses the main reasons of persuiting Cumulative Protection and the demarcation principles in order to avoid its systematic problems and conflicts under these dual protection systems. In particular, the principle of ‘functionality doctrine’ and the copyrightability of useful articles(applied arts design) under the “separability standard” that is still working as an important demarcation principle. Furthermore, this article will analyze the provision for resolving conflicts between IPRs for design protection, which is providing that prior rights holder‘s consent is prerequisite for the use of their registered rights afterwards. Finally, after assessment of the laws and regulaions coordianting its conflicts under design law whether they are working as a reasonable standards, this article will propose a workable method for the desirable directions of current design protection system to be revised in the future for the solution of conflicts between IPRs for design protection.